Are You Wasting Money on Legal Directories?

Conrad Saam:

Hey everyone. Sometimes one of the things I get asked is, why are you and Gyi such good friends? And Gyi, I know I’m blindsiding you with this banter intro, but you and I had dinner the other evening with a third party. Do you want to share the awkward dinner that I tried to uninvite myself from that you insist that I come along with and has then turned into a typical Gyi Conrad interaction?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t think it was awkward at all.

Conrad Saam:

I know this is why it’s wonderful people don’t get this. It’s great. Go ahead, share the story.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We were having dinner in Seattle and we’ll leave the third party anonymous. I think that’s, we

Conrad Saam:

Can leave the third party anonymous, but we should say this is a

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Good friend of mine,

Conrad Saam:

Good friend of Gyi’s, and soon to be ex-GNGF client.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, fair. We’ll see maybe, but that’s kind of the story is that we’re like, Hey, you make a decision. We think that you might be in a bad spot. And then the awkward part is how we tripped over each other, complimenting each other and telling this person, I was telling them they should hire you and you were telling ’em they should hire me and ultimately they should hire whoever’s the best fit for them. But

Conrad Saam:

That’s right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, we’re aligned on that. We’re aligned on that value. Do the right thing.

Conrad Saam:

So it was very, very cool. I don’t know how many times you’ve ever been on a dinner pitch with your competitor and we both tried to kind of back off on it. It’s just the way Gyi and I work and I think that’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Why our businesses are so small. Alright, Conrad, what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

So we’ve got a long news segment brought to you by some breaking news that you may find somewhat redundant. After that, we’re going to go deep on legal directories and whether or not you should be spending your time and money thinking about them,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

PE makes the world go round.

Announcer:

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

Conrad Saam:

Alright, Gyi. There’s a lot of shenanigations going on in the digital and legal world. There’s a lot that we have to cover in news. We’re going to do a long news segment before we get to our directory conversation. Alright? There’s a big spat that really impacts all of my clients and I suspect all of your clients a spat between WP Engine and WordPress. WP Engine is a managed WordPress host and WordPress is the defacto default preferred and really only answer for a website platform unless you’ve chosen to gone with Scorpion and handcuff yourself to a proprietary platform. But that’s from a different episode. Gyi, what’s going on between WP Engine and WordPress?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is actually a much bigger mess than even if you’re a WP Engine client. Matt Mullenweg, I apologize, I’m not pronouncing his last name correctly, but he’s the godfather of WordPress, but WordPress is open source. It’s an open source platform for web publishing. It’s got a global community of developers that build the core files, they build plugins. I think I read somewhere that it’s like 40% of the web’s on WordPress. I dunno if that’s right. I don’t have a source for that, but I think the New York Times is on WordPress. A lot of companies on WordPress and my view of it, I’m on team WP Engine on this because I think it kind of breaks the entire ecosystem what Mullenweg’s doing, but my view is that he’s like WP Engine is making all this money and they’re not contributing enough back to the WordPress community. There’s really no contractual obligation that anybody contributes back, but he is picking on WP Engine and here’s the thing, regardless of how this plays out in the long run, he’s created all of this instability and uncertainty on WordPress. I know people, site owners that are jumping off of WordPress just because it’s like we can’t be a part of this mess. And not to quote Kanye here, but no one man should have all that power. I mean, he’s really destabilized the entire WordPress ecosystem in my opinion. What are you telling clients right now?

Conrad Saam:

So we’re telling clients this, which is what we usually do when something comes up, don’t panic right now we

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are don’t do anything. Wait. It’s wait and see mode. Still wait and see,

Conrad Saam:

But learning how to manage because all of our clients are on WordPress. All of our hosting and managed hosting is on WP Engine, right? That is just across the board. Same. We may have a couple of outliers, but so is this a problem? Is this going to be a big term problem? And the answer is, it actually might be

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. Because I think for people who are, if you’re on WP Engines, hey, forget about whether you’re Conrad and Gyi climb, but if you’re on WP Engine, WordPress cut off access from WP Engine to their repositories to do things like security patches and stuff. They’ve restored that since, but this is a kind of mutually assured destruction type of gamesmanship that they’re playing here to negotiate. And if they turn it off again, WP Engines made some reassurances that they have workarounds, but no one wins here.

Conrad Saam:

Nobody wins.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think they’re going to sort it out.

Conrad Saam:

Well, it is mutually assured destruction and there’s no upside for either of them. It’s just a self-inflicted wound. It does open the door, I think for a different platform.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I know I heard principals giving massive discounts to migrate from WP Engine, but again, the point is it doesn’t matter. Pressly will be the next target. It’s just when you get a big enough target, he’s coming after you.

Conrad Saam:

Anyway, for our listeners being actionable and helpful, Gyi and Conrad say, don’t do anything. Don’t panic. We will take care of it if and when it becomes a major problem. This is a great, we’ll switch

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You to Squarespace.

Conrad Saam:

I thought you were going to say we’ll switch you to Scorpion because they won’t have this problem because it’s their own closed system. I mean, if I’m Scorpion, this actually looks pretty good right now just throwing out there. It Does.

Okay, moving on from that stuff. Ads showing up in the AIOs. You called this last episode or the episode before.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ve been talking about this longer than people have wanted to talk about it. Google has to keep up in this AI arms race and they’re a one trick pony and ads is their trick and they’re putting ads in the AIOs and I think that if they get it figured out where they’re still hitting their revenue targets with the ads and the aios, you’re going to see an uptick in AIOs showing up. And I think we’re already starting to see that. And some of the recent click-through rate studies that I’ve seen is that, and this is the problem, is that the aios decrease ad clicks by 20% or something. Google doesn’t want that and so

Conrad Saam:

They’ll figure that out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They’ll figure it out. You’re just going to see ads in the AIOs, it’s just going to be sponsored. Listen, that’s a ux. That’s a UX issue.

Conrad Saam:

So Gyi called this a while ago. The other thing to note is those ads are showing up from your Google Ads account and there’s nothing extra special you have to do with that. There’s also no way to know what’s triggering those ads. So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Classic Google, you’re

Conrad Saam:

Continuing this theme of we don’t know what the fuck is going on because we’re not showing you anything.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There’s our F bomb for the day.

Conrad Saam:

There’s our, oh, it’s not. I’m going to draw you. So by the way, dear listener, if you’re sitting there in traffic wondering whether or not you should move over to Pod Save America or continually to listen to Gyi and Conrad, Gyi is heated. He is two cups of coffee in and he is heated. So this is Americanos two Americanos. I don’t even know what that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Means. Not just coffee. That’s

Conrad Saam:

Espresso. That’s two espresso. I thought that was a coffee that voted for Trump. Oh, anyway, sorry. Political humor too. Okay, moving on. The big news of the day is the internet brands acquisition of FindLaw. This just hit and we’re going to spend a little bit of time after the news segment talking more in much more detail about directories in general, but under the guise of this internet brands FindLaw acquisition and

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, this is messed up. This is messed up because Conrad talked about this before it happened. So he knows something or somebody I don’t know, but he was talking about this, Adam play the clip. We talk about that even in our agencies. In fact, I can point to episodes where you’ve said we have an advantage as agencies because we have data and I think there’s no doubt that Scorpion is arguably most data in digital legal. My issue is that

Conrad Saam:

Except for internet brands.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh right. Internet brands who

Conrad Saam:

Takes it from all over the place. And I believe, and this holds true for at the risk of throwing crap at everyone in the market right now. This is true for internet brands and all of the brands underneath the internet brands. It’s also true for Scorpion, I believe they are optimizing for the system. They’re not optimizing for Bill and Jane the attorney.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

If you didn’t listen to the last episode, that’s a clip from our prior episode before all this news came out, and I’m not going to put Conrad on the spot, but it sure seems like Conrad had some kind of inside knowledge about this. I know. Conrad, do you have any statements you want to make about this?

Conrad Saam:

I think we should keep moving on. And this is

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Deep throat stuff. This is like Nixon, Watergate stuff.

Conrad Saam:

So we did launch the pod right before the acquisition was announced. If you want to draw those dots,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Something’s going on there.

Conrad Saam:

Go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad’s going to get some kind email peculate. He’s going to get someone’s show up, speculate a few at Conrad’s place of work anyway. Alright, moving on. Okay,

Conrad Saam:

The interesting thing there as I was re-listening to that clip, I think the quote was, all of the brands underneath internet brands

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Like avo,

Conrad Saam:

Like Avo, we can get into did used to

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Work at avo.

Conrad Saam:

We’re going to come back to this in our directory conversation. There’s a whole bunch of stuff about Avvo, but you pointed this out to me earlier. I looked at the internet brands listings under legal. There’s nolo vo martindale lawyers.com and it seems like there’s some missing brands. Did they divest of Total Attorneys and or Ngage, Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do you know? Well, I know I double checked that. They for sure still are listed as the footer on Ngage and so they must have read your blog post and got a little cold feet about publicizing their ownership of Ngage

Conrad Saam:

And the reason for that,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Good job, Conrad.

Conrad Saam:

For those of you who are new listeners, I don’t know that has anything to do with me. But the Engaged Chat platform tries to determine whether or not you are a good client for that law firm. And if they don’t, they try and resell that leads through these family of literally internet brands in legal space. I don’t think that’s very seamlessly. So that’s a whole different pod that we did. We’ll find the link to that one as well.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And now all the FindLaw customers will have access to those Engage

Conrad Saam:

Leads. That’s exactly right. So Gyi, why do you think they made this purchase?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I have no idea why they made the purchase. No, this is their model, right? What’d Mark Whitehead say?

Conrad Saam:

Oh, you’re okay. Alright.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, we’ll wait for after the break. After the break,

Conrad Saam:

No, well after the break. Other things in the news, if you are listening to this on Wednesday in the greater DC area, Ben Glass and I are hanging out tomorrow, Thursday, October 11th or 12th, whatever the Thursday is, come join us at Ben Glass’s office, pizza beer conversation about digital marketing and also I was psyched. I haven’t written for Search Engine Land in over a decade. Gyi and I have talked a lot about the increasing costs for Pay per-click due to the brand conflation issue, there is a great search engine land article on brand conflation and why it is driving your overall pay per-click budget up.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, actually it was awesome. I had a world’s colliding because our other agency that’s outside of legal, your article popped up in the Slack feed and I was like, oh Conrad. Nice job.

Conrad Saam:

That is super gratifying. People still reading Search Engine Land even

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Though

Conrad Saam:

Danny Sullivan left it years and years and years ago.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Go check it out now. Let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, now this is not the first time we’ve done a deep dive into the question around the value of legal directory is we covered this back in 2022 and I’m wondering if things have fundamentally changed or if we’re going to be giving the same advice. What do you think?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well look, as we talked in the pre-show, I didn’t want to waste everybody’s time talking about another legal acquisition. I think there are some obvious market forces that lawyers should be wise to like consolidation of these platforms means less choice, it means more leverage for the ad platforms in terms of, we’re talking about data last time, this might be the only company that has more data perhaps in legal than Scorpion does.

Conrad Saam:

I think they have a lot more data. I think they have a lot more variety of data than Scorpion does given some of the brands that they own and work with. Captora for example, I’ll use Ngage as another example. Total Attorneys, I think they have total attorneys. There’s a lot more data available to them. Internet brands as a whole has kind of made a business of doing a better ish job with SEO with these large brands and then milking them as a cash cow. That’s really the model and it has worked for them over time. I don’t know how well it worked for the clients, but it has worked for the NBA’s running internet brands.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, again, we’re already belaboring. We didn’t want this to feel like a oh counter adding, Gyi, woe is me. There’s all this consolidation going on. But again, one is the heads up. Same thing we said last time. I think lawyers need to be aware of this, of what’s going on in the marketplace so they can make informed decisions about this stuff. But two, there are tangible consequences and there are things that are going to impact like, hey, you’re a practicing lawyer, you’re having lunch, you listen to Lunch, Hour, Legal, Marketing. We want to give you some tactical things that you should be thinking about to put to work in your firm in the context of this thing. And so a lot of people think about fine law and us included Conrad famous for his fine law jailbreak guide. We think of Finelaw as a website, a law firm website and SEO and media managed like an agency. We think of fine law as one of the bigger, longer standing agencies. But the other thing that people are probably familiar with FindLaw in the lawyer context is that they’ve got this giant findlaw.com directory of lawyers and they have paid listings. And so that’s what we’re going to focus on today. And Conrad, you actually have, you were just recently asked about serendipitously, you were just recently asked by a client about directories. So give us the question.

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to ask the question, but this is a question that all of you ask at least once a year. This is another internet brands property. This was around Martindale Hubble. This is an internal question. Martindale Hubble, a legal director we’ve been in since before I started, is increasing its prices for accounts like ours with X number of attorneys listed. We are paying about $204 a month for each profile. The new listing is $260 a month. It stinks that their prices are increasing so dramatically for us this year, but Martindale Hubble comes up high-ish in searches and their website has a strong 84 rating for backlinking. Should I do this? How would you go about assessing, Gyi, whether or not, what would your advice be to my client? I’ll bill them four $50 an hour for your insight. How would you tell my client or a client that you have whether or not they should spend this money?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, in fact, as we were prepping for this, I have an email that was forwarded to me from one of our clients from

Conrad Saam:

See

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Happens all the time. Bill Nolo, this is from the, I guess is their rep. I wanted to mention the Martindale Nolo profile, which is included on a standalone basis is of great value because when we link back to your website through anchor text, follow through links, follow through links, have you heard follow through links? Follow through link links. It’s helpful because we are authoritative, longstanding and relevant. And so to your client’s point, there’s this view of like, oh, we’re getting these links now let’s do the SEO part first. I am pro in a vacuum organic citations and links in a directory profile forgetting about paying for them. You’ll claim your profile on major directories like avo, FindLaw lawyers.com. There’s no question that being visible on vertical specific legal directories with your correct business information and a backlink has value to SEO. Then the question is, well net what is the value.

Conrad Saam:

Can I back you up one question before we get to the money on this?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

You said major directories for our dear listener. Explain why you made that qualifying word when you talk about directories

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because like every other website I can start Gyilegaldirectory.com and charge you a hundred dollars a month for a listing there and it’ll have zero value. These directories are the ones that show up for head term searches, which we will get into more of that when we get into the lead assessment thing. But we know that Google thinks these directories are relevant to legal. They rank for competitive legal queries. And so yeah, we know that those are sources of authority from these sites. So to So

Conrad Saam:

Tactically, hold on, I’m going to get you tactical again. How would our dear lesser determine whether or not something is a major legal directory or a fly by night? I just started something out of Uzbekistan.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, the easiest way, if you’re like a novice easy way is just to go see if it ranks for anything, right? I mean, in my viewpoint, if you want to simplify link building, the most relevant links are on the pages that rank for the query, right? Google’s telling you, we think this is relevant for the query because we’re putting it in our results. So whether it’s right or wrong, that’s what Google thinks. That’s Google’s perspective of it.

Getting your business listed on those directs is major legal ones that rank, no question that has value. The hard part is, and again, we’re focusing on the SEO part first is, alright, how much should I spend on it? That’s the trickier part. Now, I would say to your client, is your client quote market dominating law firm or is your client, I got a couple thousand bucks a month to spend on internet marketing? Because to me all of the resource deployment has to be thought of in the context of their objectives and their overall budget. And again, your client, I can’t remember in the question, did they share the pricing?

Conrad Saam:

Yes, it is $260 a month for an attorney profile. Plus, hold on, this is weird. The new pricing is $260 a month for the first attorney profile, plus $35 for each additional attorney. This is actually interesting

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Buy in bulk.

Conrad Saam:

Well, it’s the buy in bulk, but there’s an SEO implication to this as well. That is really a fascinating way to look at it. Two 60 a month plus $35 for each additional attorney. So they’re talking about around $6,000 a year to spend on these directory listings. Do it or not, Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, does that $6,000 represent a hundred percent of this firm’s marketing budget or 1% of this firm’s marketing budget? One, okay, probably do it. Probably do the base profile also, where’s the visibility? What’s the difference between the free version? Are they getting a bunch more pages of links, diminishing returns in my opinion? So that’s the other challenge with this.

Conrad Saam:

Can you go into the diminishing returns of these links and why is Martindale charging two $60 for the first attorney and $35 for each additional attorney from an SEO perspective?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, they’re pitching more links the better. And that’s not necessarily the case. Now there’s arguments about do they have multiple locations? Then you can say, well geographically targeted anchors might be more valuable if it’s not all going to the same place. But I would say as a general rule of thumb, and I know that people disagree with me on this, I’m much more focused on total number of linking root domains than I am on overall number of links.

Conrad Saam:

Bingo. So that first link that if you have nothing from Martin Dell Nolo, that first link is actually pretty valuable. The second link, less so the 202nd link, even less. So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The caveat I would say to that is, is that if one is on a bunch of pages about car accidents and then the second one’s about a bunch of pages about something other different topic, there’s some argument to say, well, you want some diversity and the topical nature of the anchors and also also local,

Conrad Saam:

These are profiles, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s the thing I’m like, but

Conrad Saam:

Remember profile

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Profiles, the profiles get thrown up on these topically and geographic. We’ll dive into one of the actual directory pages, but it’ll be like forward slash chicago, forward slash car accident. And then if you’re like slash dallas slash car accident and those are linking to different internal pages on your site and you’re using different internal pages in your Google business profiles, that’s where you start being like, well, there’s geographic relevance, things that you want to think about. And so anyway, this got more nuance than I think we intended.

Conrad Saam:

No, that’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great. I think overall, my view is is that major directories, there’s going to be some threshold number of investment you probably should be making. What that number is, should be in the context of your overall marketing budget, in my opinion. People will also that are listening, if you’re a little more sophisticated, be like, but wait, these are no followed links. A lot of them are no followed links. That’s another thing that we’ll talk about in a second. The rep’s email is certainly misleading in terms of both Google’s guidelines as well as an SEO person would look at that email and be like, there’s an implication that these are followed back links for SEO purposes. And most of the ones that even I just checked before pre-show on a lot of these directories, most of ’em are either no followed or sponsored, right?

Conrad Saam:

Hey, Gyi, what’s a no followed or sponsored link? Why are you making the distinction?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, that’s the way I say it. A lot of people have jumped on, I love this terminology, but I think this is Google’s line on this is that no follow and sponsored are suggestions to Google that these links should not be counted in terms of ranking. I will say this, I don’t buy it for a second.

Conrad Saam:

Wikipedia, that was next follow up question.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, Wikipedia links are no filed. Maybe we could argue there’s some kind of dampening or something. I know that Google’s official line is they don’t count. But remember, Google is a data machine. It’s a very resource intensive endeavor to index the entire web. And so if they’re indexing it, if they’ve got a page that’s indexed and that link is indexed and it’s showing seeing it in search console and you’re seeing it when you look for site colon queries and they’re actually Google spending resources to keep it in the index, you’re doing something with it, in my opinion.

Conrad Saam:

Well, the no follow thing, it used to be very real. It used to be binary, it was on or off, and the no follow thing was absolutely real thing. When I got into this game, this is a long time ago, the no follow links were called link condoms, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think the industry overthought that though. I think that there was those,

Conrad Saam:

But you’re right. So what happened is the industry tried to use and abuse and manipulate no follow on links, and then Google started looking away from it. There was another question that you were given the other day. This was about kind of cloaking H one texts for a, or sorry, it was title tag text, how to write a title tag that is good for SEO, but actually have a title on the page that shows up for the user. And a long time ago, Google decided like, Hey, we’re going to look at what the actual formatting is on the page as opposed to what you may or may not have as your actual code. Same thing happened with no follows. They’re using what they know, the notion that Wikipedia links are no follow and therefore Google doesn’t think about it when it is the most curated site on the web. That is laughable.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s take a quick break. Alright, and we’re back. So let’s parse the second part of this question.

Conrad Saam:

Alright,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Which is the business value from a client generation. It is advertising. So let’s do the math. It’s $6,000 a year and let’s put the SEO aside, the relative value of the SEO that’s a little bit more subjective. If it’s a small part of your budget, probably worth doing a lot of cases. Let’s go into just the client development. Are these ads, they’re ads, they’re sponsored listings, are they generating cases or not? Okay, well let’s see what it’s got to do. What’s the value of a client here in this context? What practice area are we in?

Conrad Saam:

This personal injury? So you can make the very easy assessment. One client pays for itself. Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, well let’s do cost per case.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So cost per case, $6,000 cost per case.

Conrad Saam:

You got to add two clients a year out of this

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To make it even. Yeah, two

Conrad Saam:

Sniffly. Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right.

Conrad Saam:

Agree. Probably three.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think I would be, we actually talked about this set advocacy 360, and I kind of poo-pooed it, but if you want a simple metric to use the $2,000 Mendoza line cost per client, you need three clients, you need three clients for this to happen, then now you’re into the harder part, which is how do you track this? How do you actually do attribution for this directory? So Conrad, how would you tell this client? What do we have to have in place in order for us to actually be able to figure out the cost per client from this directory?

Conrad Saam:

So there’s a couple of things. Number one, the directory needs to have a tracking phone number that has to be a part of the game, which most of the time they actually want because they want to be able to tell you that they made your phone ring even if it was just a pizza guy, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. One thing too, I don’t know where you are on this. Do you have the ad platform’s tracking number forward to a CallRail number or do you have a forward,

Conrad Saam:

We always use CallRail, otherwise you have to believe what the fox is telling you,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Tell fuck that. So hold on. For people that don’t know we’re laughing about here. Explain.

Conrad Saam:

Explain. We’re not talking by ourselves. We’ve lost everyone.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, because let’s say I’m like, okay, I listen to Gyi and Conrad, I’m going to buy some of these directory list and see if they work. And this platform, this ad platform is selling me on. It’s got tracking numbers, everything’s fine.

Conrad Saam:

It’s got tracking numbers. Great. The problem is if you let your directory or your vendor tell you how often your phone is ringing, let me use a very simple example with the directory. They will try and take credit for every single time that phone rings. And if someone calls you seven times, they will report that as seven leads. If you have it forward to CallRail, CallRail will figure out that it’s the same person calling you seven times and will only show up as one lead. And you have the call recording in CallRail, you can actually see what is going on and then you can take your CallRail data, even the recordings and automagically throw it into your intake management system. If you’re using a sophisticated intake management system, that’s why you need to do it. Instead of just letting some graph from some monthly report show up and tell you that everything is going hunky dory and that $6,000 you’re dropping that year is a really good investment. So relying on your vendor to report on how they’re doing, especially with things like phone calls and form fills, it is a futile, silly effort.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m going to throw another thing at you here. What about NAP consistency?

Conrad Saam:

Well, a lot was made about NAP consistency going way back. So the NAP consistency, most of the directories, and this goes back to my days at Avvo, when we were really big on tracking phone numbers. Most of the directors will enable, and you can do this with code, enable you to identify your primary phone number and you can also use a displayed tracking number, which is totally fine. It is not an app. Totally fine

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Problem. That’s right.

Conrad Saam:

And the directories as citations, this is important. The nap game has changed dramatically, but having these citations correct is actually important. I’ll also add as a side note tangent that you do the same thing with Google business profile. So the displayed number in your Google business profile should be a CallRail number that you track and it is unique to Google business profile. Otherwise you have no idea what GP is actually doing for you. You also need to have your primary phone number on that GBP listing and that’s not going to scramble anything.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I think most of these majors are doing it, but if you’re looking at this kind of stuff and you’re like, I got tracking numbers, but you’re not doing that and it’s on a major directory, that’s one of these places that Google actually looks for data, that can be a problem. To your point, I think that the nap value is probably not as strong as it used to be because it used to be like the primary thing. But anyway, you still got to track it. Also, we taught phone tracking. You got to track it all the way back to your CRM, so you actually know that this turned into a case for you. And again, to Conrad’s point, you should be doing this independently of all the tracking stuff because we’ve seen the reports. You’re going to get this report. It’s like, well look at all these impressions. You got all these ad impressions and you got all these profile views and you got all this stuff, and that’s all nonsense until you get an open case in your CRM that you can source back to this directory. And for this context, you got to have three of ’em.

Conrad Saam:

Just because we’re talking about tracking, I don’t want to overlook this. I would also be using UTM codes to make sure that you know that the actual website traffic to your site is happening. If you run that for a year and you’ve got a whole big zero, you’re probably pretty certain that the phone is not ringing either. So I wouldn’t discount the UTM code’s tracking directory traffic into your site.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Totally. And one more thing we just were like, oh yeah, GIS like do it and it’s worth it and blah blah. Go check to see if the directories are even ranking for your target queries. It totally varies by practice, area and location. I mean, if you’re in the middle of nowhere, I was doing a San Bernardino criminal defense lawyer search, guess what? Find laws directory page for that was like the number one thing in Google. That’s not true if you go to downtown Chicago and New York. And so this goes back to our 2022 conversation, the directory’s visibility and search for your target queries and what does your presence look like on the directory page? Because even if that directory’s getting that visibility, if you are buried on the page or all the competitors listed on the page have way more reviews than you, you got the same problem that we talk about in these other contexts. It’s never going to convert for you

Conrad Saam:

And the directories play a bunch of horseshit games to try and convince you when they’re selling you that you are special. And in many cases, they’ll do things like they’ll rotate, right? And so they’ll sell 20 people. The top spot you just rotate. You’re one of 20, you get 5% of it. I would be really careful about whether or not when you get these directory listings, if you expect to get value beyond the SEO link, which if you’re paying for, it goes against Google guidelines, but that’s kind of beside the point. At this point in time, if you’re expecting to get value beyond that link, I would want to, you’re not.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You won’t. Off the top of your head, how many clients do you got that you’re like, I know that we are four to five x multiple on fees, specifically from let’s take your best friend avo,

Conrad Saam:

My best friend avo, speaking of, wow, how about I’ll play defense on this back in the day. The answer is absolutely there were people absolutely building their business on avo.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, you’re talking back in the day. You mean presale.

Conrad Saam:

I mean presale.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right. And

Conrad Saam:

Probably much earlier than that. I mean, AVO generated a ton of business for law firms. It’s interesting. We talk about internet brands in avo.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. Did the value of AVOs advertising become more or less valuable to lawyers pre or post the acquisition?

Conrad Saam:

I would say it has faded somewhat into obscurity. I mean, even I know you track search results more than I do it. Really?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. They were gone until Google brought forum and discussions back. They basically had disappeared, which is why Mark Whitehead says,

Conrad Saam:

Oh, Mark Whitehead, we have to come back to the Mark Whitehead, mark wrote on somewhere on the socials when we were talking about this fine law purchase internet brands is where companies go to die, which is kind of brutal. I’ve heard it before. It’s not the first time

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ve that I’ve heard it before too. Yeah. I don’t think Mark coined that, but I think Mark was probably quoting you.

Conrad Saam:

No, AVO did kind of fade off to obscurity. I think if you look at the internet brands playbook, and I’ll use AVO as an example. I was so close, by the way, thank you. Internet brands for the big check. I shouldn’t ignore, ignore that fact that it worked out really fine for Conrad.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I bet it works great for internet brands too.

Conrad Saam:

Well, so this is where I’m going. I think they actually do a good job of the cash cowing, the brands that they purchase.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Totally. Totally. They know exactly what they’re doing.

Conrad Saam:

So I naively very naively thought that when internet brands purchased avo, they were going to put Mark Britain in charge of the legal kind of KSU of portfolio companies that they had, and he would drive innovation and they did the exact opposite. I can’t remember the last innovative thing that AVO did other than selling to internet brands.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No. The most innovative thing they did was buying Engage, and then selling the lawyer’s leads to other law firms.

Conrad Saam:

Wow, okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s brutal. I mean, that’s innovative,

Conrad Saam:

Right? If you’re an MBA, sure, it’s not tech innovative. You’re going to get some hate mail. Dude,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re the one who broke that story.

Conrad Saam:

I did break that story, and I only broke that story. I had two fucking clients who were so pissed off that it was happening to them, and they had no idea why they asked us what we were doing to make this happen. They thought it was us. They were pissed. Anyway, that’s an aside.

If you look at the Avvo model and then you consider the Finelaw model, my expectation is that they will cash cow This. There’s probably not going to be a lot of innovation that is coming. That is investment that is made into the FindLaw brand. The other thing that I think will probably happen is, you alluded this or not alluded, you called this out at the beginning. There’s a lot more data, right? So they will now have access to a lot more data, and there’ll be cross data usage and value between Ngage, Captora, lawyers.com, Martindale, Nolo, Avvo, et cetera, and then it’ll include FindLaw and the value of that data. Again, I lust after access to that data, there are over 4,000 solo practitioners who use FindLaw. Are they better off or worse off? I don’t know.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, and I’m going to be super curious to see in the context of, because again, we really focus on the directory aspect of this. Do they continue their website building? Do they continue media management? Other context? Again, that seems to be a place where that data becomes extremely valuable. The directory stuff, they’re primarily at the whim of Google, right? It’s like does Google continue to show directories prominently in these search results, or does Google decide to show its own directory in the local PAC more prominently in local services ads? I don’t know that, but I think the thing that we can say is how many legal services consumers, when they start their legal services hiring journey are thinking, I’m going to go to findlaw.com or I’m going to go to avo.com, or I’m going to go to maybe lawyers.com because it’s literally lawyers.com. And I think the answer to that is very few. That’s what we should do is person on the street ask them They ever heard of

Conrad Saam:

Avvo Answers?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

I mean, Avvo spent a lot of money trying to change that equation.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I love their commercials, by the way. I love their TV commercials.

Conrad Saam:

Yes. And ask anyone who doesn’t work in legal to tell you about one of those commercials today, and you’ll get the blanks there. Yeah, it’s the Google game. So interesting. Very, very interesting. We had two acquisitions in less than two weeks as far as Gyi, and I knew nothing about either of them, and we don’t know anything about anything else on the horizon either. Perhaps next pod, we won’t have to talk about another acquisition. We’ll, we’ll have something else to

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Talk about. I foresee a

Conrad Saam:

Few more coming. Come on. I just tried to tease it. Now you’re, see, you accused me of having the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Mole. I was talking about your mole.

Conrad Saam:

I think you’re trying

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Your mole.

Conrad Saam:

Are we having Mole envy now?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So thank you again. Dear listener, we’re sorry that we belabored you with another acquisition talk, but we hope you found something valuable in terms of assessing your investments in these directories and tracking it back to clients. As always, if you just landed here, please do subscribe for more. Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi is saying, bear one.

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