The Frequently and Rarely Asked Questions of Legal Marketing

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam: Before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors, Lawmatics, Nota and Lawyaw. Gyi, if you were famous, what do you want to be famous for?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I would like to be famous for being kind.

Conrad Saam: For being kind that’s so I want to give you a hug, all right, let me give you another one. If we could go anywhere, you want it on vacation specifically, we, that’s me and you, where would you choose and why?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well man, I got to tell you this one hits close to home because you so generously invited me to go whitewater rafting with you, and which you are going, I believe, and man, I feel like I’m missing out, so that’s what I would like to do is go whitewater rafting with you. Thanks again for the invite.

Conrad Saam: That will be cool. That would be great. Okay, these questions are brought to you by something I found unintentionally on Amazon. This is Talking Point Cards, the Family Edition and it’s very simple. They have these written out questions and I thought this was going to be one of those corny things that I did with my kids that they would eye roll. But they’re begging for these at the dinner table and we’re no longer talking about what the most ridiculous meme was that you saw on the Internet today or sounding like Beavis and Butt-Head having a fart contest at the table. We are talking about important thing.

So, endorsement from me, check out Talking Point Cards, you can get them on Amazon. It’s like 20 bucks, but very much worth it, especially if you have kids.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Love it. Take my money. Get those cards. Conrad, I have a question for you, close your eyes and imagine that you were going to record a legal marketing podcast today. What would you be talking about?

Conrad Saam: Wow, I’ve got a bunch of questions Gyi. So after we hit the news, we’re going to go two different segments on questions, we’re going to do FAQs and racks. Segment one, we’re going to ask and answer the frequently asked questions that Gyi and I get all the time. Section number two a little bit more insightful. We are going to ask the questions that we never get asked, but should be asked.

When we come back, the news.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Music.

[Music]

Intro: 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.

[Music]

Conrad Saam: All right Gyi in the news, it’s almost like the people at Mountain View have been listening to our show and are very concerned about the volume of fake reviews. Google recently sued a company for leaving lots of fake reviews and fake GMB profiles. This was not in the legal industry but it was a step by Google to kind of crack down on the reviews. Do you see this going bigger well like why did they pick out one company? This seems like a very strange approach and expensive approach for Google to take in terms of combating fake reviews. What do you think?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well I love the concept. I love the idea of let’s do a shock and awe campaign. We talked about this before, part of the solution here is scaring people out of doing this stuff and getting sued by Google can be scary but and I don’t know all the details. Maybe you can fill in some of the details. When I part some of this story, I was like, who did they sue? I mean, I could name probably a dozen or two dozen really bad fake review companies that are like just pouring out reviews.

Now, again, I’m very focused on legal so I don’t maybe the scale of this is different somewhere else, but like, it seems like the kind of picked on somebody out of nowhere. But like, am I holding my breath to see if this totally shakes up the review game? No, I am not.

Conrad Saam: Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But I, and I’m very reluctant to cheer for Google on anything. On this one, I’m cheering for them, to be honest with you, I don’t even read the basis of the lawsuit. I don’t know any of the details of the claim, but if it does something to slow down the onslaught of fake reviews, I’m all for it.

Conrad Saam: But yet you are very cynical that that’s going to have the –

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah you know every litigation – here is a short answer, let’s say they win maybe it –

Conrad Saam: There is a couple of companies.

Gyi Tsakalakis: If at all happens, the same company starts right back under different name.

Conrad Saam: Yeah, yeah. So it’s more like you have to deal with the problem.

Gyi Tsakalakis: They’re like, we’re bankrupt, we’re bankrupt, we can’t pay the judgment, whatever it is, maybe they are trying to get an injunction or something. But I don’t know if these people are on US soil, but like, depending what country they’re in, you know, I don’t know. I’m cynical it’s going to have that much of an impact but I like the effort. I do like the effort.

(00:04:56)

Now, here’s my thing though. Hey Google, there are plenty of smart people in review world who have tons of great suggestions for actually combating fake reviews without taking people to court. So why don’t you pay them instead of your lawyers to sue people?

Conrad Saam: Interesting idea like your employees, for example. All right, the next piece of the news is we occasionally cover Venture Capital because it’s an indicator of what’s hot and EvenUp raises $50.5 million in their Series V. EvenUp is AI and PI. So there is a PI Legal Assistant built on AI brought to you by EvenUp. The interesting thing for me this is Series B are $325 million valuation. Someone is seeing lots of promise in this so we’ll see what happens. But congrats to your friends at EvenUp. If you would like to sponsor a podcast boy, oh boy, do I have someone for you to talk to?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Did you know what it does? Do you know what EvenUp does?

Conrad Saam: Oh yeah, do you want me to read this? I’ll read you the very quick piece of this. Our AI demands product analyzes medical records and generates demand letters.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh boy.

Conrad Saam: All right so EvenUp, you no longer want to sponsor this podcast, that is just fine, move along.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Next new item.

Conrad Saam: Next news item, so Universal Analytics we have brought this to you maybe 10 times. We are bringing it to you the 11^th time. Gyi, what is the sunset date for Universal Analytics?

Gyi Tsakalakis: July 1^st.

Conrad Saam: July 1^st, so, by the time you’re listening to this, it’s too late. You are either on top of it or your agency sucks. We warned you.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah.

Conrad Saam: If you’re wondering what we’re talking about right now you have a problem.

Gyi Tsakalakis: If you’re running overtime by right now, you’ve never listened to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. So welcome and please subscribe.

Conrad Saam: Please review after (00:06:56).

Gyi Tsakalakis: Most importantly go research this issue because your website analytics data is about to stop working and you’re going to stop tracking everything that’s going on in your website. Surprise.

Conrad Saam: Surprise, please leave us a review at your favorite review place. All right, when we come back, we are going to open up with some facts.

[Music]

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[Music]

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[Music]

Conrad Saam: All right Gyi, it’s time for some FAQs.

Gyi Tsakalakis: FAQs?

Conrad Saam: Yeah FAQ you Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Watch your mouth Conrad.

Conrad Saam: This is not a family podcast. The only people who are family who listen to this podcast are my kids. I force them to listen to it in the car and they always ask to change to the radio.

Gyi Tsakalakis: What is a FAQ?

Conrad Saam: We are talking about frequently asked questions.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh FAQ.

Conrad Saam: A FAQ, that is the French frequently asked questions.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Why don’t you just say FAQ?

Conrad Saam: FAQ you sounds just more like we’re going to get the explicit. We haven’t got explicit tag yet. We’ll see if we can push it with an acronym that doesn’t sound very nice. Okay, moving on from what sounds like my previous dinner table conversations on occasion, we are going to ask some of the most frequently asked questions that Gyi and I get from prospects and lawyers alike.

Starting with Gyi, what do you hear the most and is it a good question?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I don’t know if it’s the most but I hear it all the time. It’s a terrible question. How do I rank number one for every queue, everybody’s favorite question, we’re SEO people, they want to know how to rank for all these keywords. And I am sure all sorts of keywords you can rank for. You are probably ranking for keywords you don’t even realize.

(00:10:03)

Conrad Saam: Do you tell him to stand in their lobby?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yes, stand in your lobby, search for your personal injury lawyer.

Conrad Saam: Your brand.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah first for your brand, then search for personal injury lawyer, then go click on your listing and then search again.

Conrad Saam: Winner, winner. Man, you’re so good at this if that’s all you have to do Gyi to be successful and that’s to dominate the local SEO market.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, the other one I always think about is one time I probably told this story on the show before but this firm posted stuff about the Detroit Lions and they got crazy traffic for Detroit Lions stuff.

Conrad Saam: Oh yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Totally irrelevant. They ranked number one, they were in search console, the impressions and clicks average position one for Detroit Lions. Unfortunately, they don’t sell Detroit Lions gear. So ranking number one didn’t do any —

Conrad Saam: Or tickets.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Or tickets or what else could you sell if you want to rank for Detroit Lions.

Conrad Saam: Tears.

Gyi Tsakalakis: What you talking about, man? They’re going to win the NFC North this year. I’m just trying to drink the Kool-Aid.

Conrad Saam: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting you say this, I’d literally just posted a blog post on this where we have this very simplistic perspective or I think a lot of people are very simplistic perspective that more traffic means more contact, and one of the things is really specific client of ours, they have a ton of traffic, they’ve never converted very well. Their entire strategy is very high up in the funnel.

Recent Google algorithm update has actually improved their traffic and we’ve really worked on growing their traffic. We’ve actually seen not just their conversion rate drop, which means they’re actually dropping their absolute value of conversion. So they’re getting less conversions with more traffic because they’re getting more traffic about stuff that is not relevant to actually hiring a lawyer. So it’s been interesting.

Don’t assume that your traffic is going to turn into calls.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, and this is another point and we’ll talk about this for some other questions but like this is why traffic is not a good question to be asking about at all or reporting on and all that kind of stuff either like, who cares? Oh yeah you got 10 million visits from some former Soviet country and you practice divorce law in South Carolina. Nice job.

Conrad Saam: Good job, doesn’t matter.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Had each other on the backs. All right, what’s your favorite or one of your top FAQ ways?

Conrad Saam: I mean, this happens quite a lot and it’s really around content strategy. How much content should we be posting and on the vendor side like how many blog posts a week do I get? I still get that question on the regular.

Gyi Tsakalakis: We had a client fire us because they didn’t think they were getting enough blog posts a week. We were like trying to do the things that we do, cost per acquisition.

Conrad Saam: Did you send them –

Gyi Tsakalakis: Qualified consultations, target cost per acquisition, they are like we don’t care if this feels like you are not getting us enough stuff, and then you know, this is the thing, we talked about this all the time, but like the deliverables are tangible, right. Posts are tangible.

Conrad Saam: People like posts.

Gyi Tsakalakis: People love posts, content is tangible. So again, we get that question a lot too and terrible metric, I mean we can sell you how many blog posts you want, give you an infinite number, ChatGPT, right.

Conrad Saam: Thank you AI. Yeah I mean so the flip side is my take on content strategy is most of you still are living in this fallacy of the long tail. It’s not that it’s not a thing. But most of you believe that you just need to throw more crap on the web and that will make you money and it doesn’t.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Careful there because I was going to say you can actually rank do really well in the long tail but it’s not a matter of more post.

Conrad Saam: Yeah. 100% right. And so, but there is this thought that we just need to vomit more stuff out there.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right.

Conrad Saam: Most of you, most of you have never gone back and looked at how your content is performing. I think we’ve talked about this in the past is probably some old pods that we can link to. But most of you are not going back to see which of your content is actually driving traffic or driving consults or at least phone calls, right. Most of you aren’t that. Most of you aren’t going back and looking at why do you still have the 1997 post about I won the Super Lawyers Award for someone who no longer works at the firm, right. Most of you don’t do that.

So there’s no legacy content analysis. There’s no current new content analysis, and you just start vomiting content onto the web and no one cares.

Gyi, actually, this is a question on this, on this specifically, do you have a page count kind of guideline where you’re like ah, they look like someone who might have too much content.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Not really because it’s more about like what’s on the pages. So, if you look at page count and a function of average length of page, I think you’ve see more stuff because there are big sites that have lots of pages.

Conrad Saam: Sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis: That might be – I don’t know the raw page count number is, but and you’ve talked about this before, so I’m stealing from you. But I think a lot of CEOs do this.

(00:15:04)

Conrad Saam: They steal from me, I appreciate.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You should look at you should look at page number in the context of number of pages indexed and number of pages generating traffic, right. So if you’ve got a lot of pages that no one’s visiting or get a lot of pages that are getting, maybe they’re even getting crawl but Google is like we are not even indexing this crap, that’s when you have a problem.

Conrad Saam: This was the early, early thing I learned as an SEO is to look at these ratios, you have your page count, your crawl count, right, which aren’t always the same thing and then you have your index count which rarely are the same thing and then you have those pages that are actually generating traffic and then those pages that actually converting, right.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right, that’s the one I was going to say.

Conrad Saam: That’s beautiful and then on top of converting and converting in the GA sense is form fill, phone call, text or chat, right, it’s just an inquiry, it could be garbage and then ideally you have on top of that, did they have a consultation right? That is a beautiful, beautiful way to look at your overall content strategy and my gut is most of you don’t.

My answer to that is when I sites that click over the 700 or 800 page count level, almost always you have a bunch of crap on your site that no one cares about and it has not been seen for a long time. It’s not always the case, but almost always it is the case and the only way to have a really big page count site that is going to get crawled, indexed and served is to have a really strong background profile.

No one really thinks about the correlation between those two things but you will not have a large index count with a weak backend profile. You just can’t no matter how much do you throw up on the web, it doesn’t matter. Next question, I throw it to you Mr. Tsakalakis.

Gyi Tsakalakis: This little button that’s been floating. I mean it’s a classic SEO question, but I’ve seen it rearing its head around my feeds at least recently. How long is this going to take?

Conrad Saam: How long is what going to take first of all?

Gyi Tsakalakis: How long the el classic SEO is, how long does it usually, it’s like, how long is it going to take for me to rank for something going back to question one, but let’s be generous to the questioner and say how long is it going to take to actually get a return on investment or how long is it going to take to maybe start seeing lead flow, I don’t know qualified consultation flow stuff like that. What’s the answer to that question by the way Conrad?

Conrad Saam: Can I say it depends without getting the buzz collar?

Gyi Tsakalakis: yes. That’s the correct answer. That’s the correct. Thank you. This is why we do this show together. We didn’t even prepare that, that’s the right answer and I’ll tell you why, I’ll give you this easy example of why.

Scenario one, you’re have a no index on your site. You’re not in the index. We flip a switch, you’re going to start getting traffic. I don’t know if you’re going to get return on investment tomorrow, but once Google re-crawls indexes, and assuming your site has anything quality on it, you’re going to start generating traffic. That’s overnight, it’s very rare that that happens.

Conrad Saam: And that seems like a crazy extreme example, but this also happened. I’m sure you did this for people with lack of category in GMB, right or GBP now, right. So you don’t have a category in Google business profile, let’s do that during this consult and I’ll show you how to do it during this consult and like tomorrow, it’s like oh my gosh, I exist.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah.

Conrad Saam: And, so these quick fixes are out there. You and I talked about this a few pods ago, there are quick fixes where you can have that rarely big return on investment. It’s usually because someone asked something up somewhere.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Exactly, if that information is all wrong, your pages are optimized for a home. You’ve got all sorts of crazy parameters in your URL structure, all sorts of technical things can show a lot of results fast.

On the other hand, you are brand-new, brand-new website, never been online before, you just graduated law school. You started your own firm. Yeah for non-brand competitive practice in competitive cities, SEO is going to be a long-term play to get to return on investment or a number of consultations that can support your business. And so again, you go back to media mix and channel diversification and all that kind of stuff.

But there is no and these people, you see these ads, right well, I’ll see ocean take long, look at us here is a chart of 0 to 10,000 visitors overnight.

Conrad Saam: Four easy steps to dominate your SEO market.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, so that’s all, you can just ignore all that stuff. It’s going to depend and someone is so I’ll tell you that if you talk to someone who actually knows what they’re doing, they’re going to say it’s going to depend and then they might say, I’ll give you a better answer after we do some research, right because if they crawl your site and they look at competitive landscape, they look at some of the technical issues, go on your site. They might be able to give you a better assessment.

And a lot of people, again, because we know that the market wants an answer to this. So we will say things like based on executing certain plans, call it 6 to 8 months, 10 to 12 months, depending on a variety of factors. But, even those even that is still somewhat arbitrary and we’re guilty of it too.

(00:20:02)

We try, but people want an answer when it’s going to happen. It’s like, well, I don’t want to miss set your expectations about this but and that’s another thing. Another good question is how frequent we’re going to check in on the performance of this thing, which again, we will get talked about when we get to our next section I think.

Conrad Saam: I have a kind of rejoinder to the how long is this going to tale.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Rejoinder.

Conrad Saam: And I do think this is a better way to frame that question in the mind of a law firm. And their question is, how long are you in it for right? Ask yourself that question. If you need business wins, if you need clients in the short term and you’re really only looking in the short term, this is not the right channel to be thinking about. If you’re in this for growth over the long term, it’s a great channel, right. But that’s the real answer.

Like if you’re really only looking 12 months out and I don’t even mean that in a negative way. Some of you are like, yeah, we need more cases right now. We just hired a lawyer like there are definitely reasons or like we have cash flow issues, right, there are definitely reasons why you should only be looking 12 months out, but if you are not looking 12 months out, if you’re in it for the long term, if you’re in it for growth for the long term, but if you really need that proof of concept in the next 6 to 12 months, like maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but it’s the wrong channel to be playing in if you need a quick win.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And that’s, I will say this. I’m going to give you one, I don’t know if this is rejoinder or not but one other thing I can hear people now being like, well, what about and yes, if you can identify a very specific niche, that’s not competitive, start a brand new site, you are publishing there, but you’re talking about, that’s like the 5%.

Conrad Saam: It’s not, I mean a really competitive niche that hasn’t been pushed by lawyers on the web yet.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah there’s emerging, I mean look at this AI stuff there’s all sorts of emerging stuff going on. Again, we’re talking like I said 5% if you’re a local family lawyer, local PI lawyer, local bankruptcy lawyer. This is we’re not talking to you. That’s the amazing thing about search because 15% of the searchers are brand new every day.

There’s a lot of still Blue Ocean on the web that people aren’t tapping into because everybody wants to rank for Chicago personal injury lawyer, and that’s what they spend all their money. I’ll leave you with that.

Conrad Saam: All right, when we come back, we’re going to get into the questions that we think you should be asking and are ignoring when you’re talking about marketing. But first a quick ad break.

[Music]

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[Music]

Conrad Saam: So I spent last week in Houston at the Lanier Trial Academy and boy, oh boy, was that a lonely place to be a vendor sitting in front of a booth. The content there was unbelievably amazing and Lanier carried the entire show for three days. I mean, it was about presentation, but he carried that for three days straight and it was amazing. I really enjoyed listening on that. One of the people who did stop by was Josh Rohrscheib, who stopped by and said I loved the shore, I look forward to it coming out every single Wednesday.

So thank you for stopping by and saying hello and that was nice to see you. And by the way, Josh, if you would like you can feel free to leave that review online, we would appreciate that as well.

Okay, we talked about FAQs. Now, we’re going to talk about RAQs, questions that we wish you would ask that we never hear. Gyi, hit me up. What is the question you wish you were asked because it would indicate that lawyers are thinking critically about what they’re doing?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, there’s I just remember to combine to hear, do I have access to my ads account but I’m really going to go with, do I own my ads account and my content management system and all the other advertising accounts or am I renting it, licensing it from you? Do you think that’s an important question Conrad?

Conrad Saam: I do think it’s an important question. I mean we have just beaten to death some of the vendors who have gone out of their way, contorted themselves contractually, technologically in ways to put the control into their hands instead of their clients and this is a disgusting MBA approach to doing business, where we have the power instead of the client, and it’s really about control.

(00:25:00)

And I am a strong believer that if I run a law firm, I would want to control all of the things that related to my marketing, which did include access and ownership and admin access to, I mean, let’s list them off. All of your social media, all of your advertising campaigns, your website’s backend, right, you want to be able to be quick in firing and getting rid of crappy vendors.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Look, bottom line is your agreement should say, you own everything that your vendor touches, it’s all the accounts, all the data, everything that you do, that’s just the way it has to be. I mean, and here are the horror stories, right, held hostage with Google business profiles, held hostage with websites, held hostage. The other thing too is we kind of alluded to this but there’s so much value in the ad account itself like the historical performance of the ad account, not everybody pays the same thing per click. A lot of people don’t realize that and if you’re just renting that from somebody else like you’re giving them all the value.

Now the counterpoint that the vendor might say is oh yeah look because that’s because we’re giving them at a reduced fee like we’re not charging him a lot to rent so they have an opportunity, they have access to this thing that they might not otherwise have. And that might be right for some firms maybe I don’t know.

Back to Conrad’s point, you’re in this for the long haul, most of the firm’s that we talk to that are really making big investments into their digital presence, in my opinion, it would be crazy to let these agencies dictate those terms to you.

Conrad Saam: And I’ll push back on your nicety there. You’re getting this at a reduced fee because we have this proprietary thing and boy are you lucky? You can’t even look at to know what they’re spending, you have no idea, right. So you’re spending with a blindfold on. We probably don’t say this enough. There’s enough shenanigans going on in the digital agency world that I would not trust anyone who didn’t let me see where my money was being spent, right.

Like I just wouldn’t, there’s a reason that you can’t see that, right is where I’m getting at. All right what else? What other questions Gyi, do you wish we were asked that we never hear.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, this is one — we kind of get asked it in some ways but it’s like, it’s being asked the wrong way, but like, every single time you talk to any agency or you talk to someone whether you are to hire a marketing person as a consultant, and really the vendors in other contexts too is like what does success look like? Let’s define success. What does winning look like?

Because if you don’t do that, everything else is what I call the cab to nowhere, you hop in, you’re paying them some money but you don’t know where you’re going.

Conrad Saam: So what’s the right answer for what success looks like?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well varies from firm of what you need, right. Different firms have different — you talk about this a lot too. Follow up question is is like where do you want to go a year from now right? Where do you want to be? What’s most important to you? What gaps do you have? Do you have a team of people who can execute? You need strategic consulting to try to do some kind of like incremental gain in market position or you’re brand-new to this thing and we do we need to benchmark metrics in the first 90 days to even get off the ground.

But having conversations about like what — that’s the only way you’re going to walk away or enter into a relationship or walk away from relationship at the end and say I feel like we either achieved our objectives or we didn’t it and it sounds silly. Well you got to have objectives in order to measure against them, right. But so many times we see that there are no objectives to measure.

Conrad Saam: I’ll bring this up and it’s a little recent, and it was a little stingy, but I’ll bring it up it for those of you who are sitting there because I have had this conversation. Like I’m not telling you what my business objectives are, you need to tell me what you’re going to do. If you have that attitude we recently walked away from a prospect where we were just at loggerheads. He wanted to know what we were going to do and how much it was going to cost and we wanted to know where he wanted to go.

If your mindset is such that you feel like that is revealing too much to tell a vendor where you want to go, when you’re asking them to help you get there, you need to in-source everything, if you just lack that trust. Otherwise you’re going to hire someone and you will always be disappointed.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, I was going to say, there’s one asterisk or rejoinder.

Conrad Saam: Rejoinder.

Gyi Tsakalakis: If you want, if you want stuff, if you want stuff, you want time and materials at cost, then you should be holding your account, your agency accountable for delivering time and materials at cost. So if you’re going to be like, I want 5 blog posts a month, then you measure the success of the program by whether or not the agency delivers 5 blog posts a month, that’s it.

Don’t start talking about performance and consultations and visibility and growth, and conversion and target cost per consultation and return on investment, just focus on what you wanted.

(00:30:00)

You wanted 5 blog posts, you weren’t going to share anything then get your 5 blog posts. Have a nice life.

Conrad Saam: In the unlikely event. You did not gather Gyi’s perspective on that. He thinks that is stupid as do I.

Gyi Tsakalakis: All right. Well will it happen is you’ll do it for a while and then I’d be like why again am I buying these 5 blog posts.

Conrad Saam: Where will you see (00:30:17) you are like woohoo.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Because that’s what you wanted, that’s what you wanted. We tried to ask you what you really wanted.

Conrad Saam: You wanted 60 blog posts a year and nothing is happening. All right, I’ll tell you the question that I don’t know that I have ever been asked despite the fact that you and I talked about this at least every other podcast, if not every single podcast. When it comes to SEO, how much of your effort is focused on link building and what do you do for link building?

We have talked over and over and over again about links and links being the hard thing to actually make happen. It’s expensive. It is not linear. It is creative, you don’t always win. It’s hard. No one, I don’t think anyone has ever gotten into anything beyond a very surface level conversation with me about what we do when it comes to generating backlinks and the reason this is so important has just become, it’s become even more important that technology by and large technology has been solved.

Like some of you have garbage websites but that’s your fault like there’s easy alternatives. Get on WordPress, get enroll code of WordPress, you solve the technology problems. Some of you had a content problem, right, some of you don’t have the content. While we have solved that with ChatGPT and QuillBot and all that stuff like, so don’t tell us that like the content map is not something that is cost-effectively solvable.

Links, that’s the remaining differentiator for SEO and yet the level of inquiry that we get about link building is very, very superficial. I don’t know if you’re seeing the same thing but that that does surprise me that we haven’t had those conversations.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say that it’s in the rare bucket. I think the reasons are obvious. One, it’s like, unless you’re a sophisticated SEO consumer, you might not even know that links are a thing, right. Most of the people we talk to are, I want to rank 1 for everything like that’s what they’re focused on. Not the why, not the how, just rank there.

The more sophisticated ones yes, and I think I guess I would you had multiple questions in there, but I think the really key one is, what’s your approach to link building, right because how much link building you’re doing that’s stuff, it’s going to vary and like what part of your business is link building, and part of the program is going to link building. Just like everything else you can get really good links and you fell into a layup doing some like broken link building for like a municipal site and you might be surprised about how easy it is to get a really local relevant link.

On the other hand, you might do what you think is an amazing PR, online PR campaign. It doesn’t pan out for a variety of reasons, there’s nothing wrong with what you did, it just didn’t turn into links and so I think it’s a lot less about like the quantification of the link building, but definitely like process.

Gyi Tsakalakis: What’s your approach to link-building? Do you have some examples of great link building campaigns you’ve done in the past? Really, really important and again my other follow-ups of the link building thing relevance and locality, not page authority, domain authority, main publisher sites in my humble opinion for local businesses.

Conrad Saam: All right, last question that I wish we got asked more frequently. Not sure if you hit this do you only work with lawyers?

Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s a great one.

Conrad Saam: Is there value? Do you think there’s value? This is genuine. I think there’s two sides to this. Do you think there’s value in hiring an agency that only works with lawyers like noting that you only work with lawyers and maybe we can have the flip side.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So I do think there’s value in working with an agency that has a lot of experience with law firms. I think not to go too far down the rabbit hole, experience with legal SERPs, experience with some of the nuances with legal in terms of Google business profiles and local optimization, experience with like even if you’re not an expert on rules, professional conduct, I think having a sense of like what some of the loose rules are.

And again, we talk about this too, and I agree with you that lawyers should be reviewing and approving everything, people do on their behalf but legal is a unique animal. Now, does that mean that all of your experiences in lawyers, I would say no, I think it’s good to have some experience or at least an agency who is collaborating or looking outside of the examples in legal because legal, if you just look at all the competition, it tends to be pretty stagnant.

Legal is not known for its innovative marketing practices. And so that’s kind of the other side of the coin. But definitely, I would say and this is a question, which should have been on our list. Do you have experience working with similarly situated law firms to mine? Do you have experience working with — if you’re a PI law firm in a major market, do have experience working with a PI law firm in a major market?

Conrad Saam: Right.

(00:35:00)

Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s why I think matters more than like are all of your clients lawyers or not. What do you think?

Conrad Saam: Yeah, I mean I think the other experience it’s really important in working in legal, this is unfortunate. Do you have experience working in an underhanded dirty like market because there’s a lot of underhanded dirty legal marketing? Let’s go digital marketing that’s going on in legal. I think you need to understand that and it’s one of those things that like you and I see it and we just recognize it because we live in it. I think if you worked in florists or puppies or something like that, you might not be exposed to the filth that lives in the legal marketing world.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Fair enough. All right, unfortunately our time today has come to an end and you might be new here. If you are, welcome again to the LHL Community. Secondly, we would love you to follow us on your podcast player of choice so you never miss an episode. In fact, you can probably do it right now on whatever podcast thingamabob, doohickey you’re listening to right now, you can find LHL on Apple, Spotify Overcast, Pocket Casts. You name it, we’re there.

And while you’re at it, we’d love to hear from you, whether that’s leaving us a rating or review or dropping us a question in one of the comments sections on our various social media identities. We do think it’s so, so important to hear directly from you, answer your questions and get you involved in our podcast creation process.

And for those regular listeners, as always, thanks again for this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Gyi and Conrad saying farewell.

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Outro: Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legaltalknetwork.com. Subscribe via Apple podcasts and RSS. Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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