The Lawyer’s Guide to Conversions || Listener LSA Queries

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Hey, Gyi, you are always one-upping me on hardware and I see that amazing Neon on-Air sign behind you. Where did that come from?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m very grateful. A team member or maybe the whole team got that for me and I always forget to turn it on. I’ve had it now. Actually, if you go back a couple episodes, you’ll see it’s sitting back there, but this is the first time that you reminded me to turn it on.

Conrad Saam:

Well, it looks fantastic and as usual, I am going to play keeping up with my podcast neighbors and I think one would look fantastic, right in my background. I like

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It. In any event, enough about my podcast Swag. What do we got today, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

So today, as always, we are starting with the news. We are going to revisit a topic about conversions, the Lawyer’s Guide to Conversions, and finally, we’ve got some great listener questions, specifically around local service ads.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Money makes the world go round,

Speaker 3:

Money makes 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 everyone, welcome to Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing. As we always do, we are going to start off with the news. All right, ski, what we can’t miss is the conversation about the congressional ban on TikTok. What’s going on and what’s your take on this

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Bans? I don’t know, bans never seem to do that much good. I mean, every time the government tries to ban something anyway, there are legit issues here. Probably a lot of ’em over my head. People ask me, should I be on TikTok? I have no idea if you should be on TikTok. I can tell you that there are a lot of people on TikTok and probably a lot of propaganda, not probably a lot of propaganda. They got all of our data. So should it be, can only US companies own social media?

Conrad Saam:

Well, lemme ask you a different question. Pragmatic, yes, I’m a lawyer. I heard about the government banning TikTok. Should I avoid TikTok? Should I not do it because the government concerns are legit for me?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe. I mean, what are you putting on TikTok Fair? What does TikTok have access to? I think there’s an interesting conversation around creators rights to their content and the ban. I’m not going to do the full legal analysis on that, but China bans a lot of social media apps. By the way. What do you think?

Conrad Saam:

I think that you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

On TikTok, Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

I dabble. I don’t belong. I’ve dabbled. I’ve realized that as a medium, it is not the right medium for me,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not a big dancer,

Conrad Saam:

But it just doesn’t really fly for me. Maybe down the road. But my point being, your audience is there probably, and you’re probably not doing anything on TikTok that is so stupid that if someone had access to that, you would have a concern over it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, unless there’s something more nefarious going on that you and I are not privy to because we weren’t in the skiff when they revealed all this stuff to Congress. I don’t know. But there are lawyers on TikTok that are doing in terms of you want to talk about affinity and awareness and I’m sure that they’re getting reached out to by potential clients. No doubt. In fact, we had one of these TikTok lawyers on the show. We’ll have to put a link to the show notes. Notes how not to use TikTok. Well,

Conrad Saam:

How Gyi thinks not to use TikTok. I thought it was a fucking,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m pretty confident we shouldn’t be outing criminals that we just got acquitted on TikTok.

Conrad Saam:

You just called his clients criminals.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, that was a mistake. That was

Conrad Saam:

Totally wrong. Okay, innocent people is

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Innocent casting aspersions of the innocent on TikTok.

Conrad Saam:

All Gyi remains a more high-minded person than I am. We’ve established that from the get go. Alright, speaking of social media, Google integrating social media posts into Google Business Profiles. Now, a while ago, Google started letting you add and edit the social media profiles that were associated with your Google Business profile account. I suggested at the time that this was in order to draw a map over who was actually writing content to help improve their search quality. And that has kind of showed up in SGEA little bit. But Gyi, have you seen a lot of, there’s a big announcement made about this. I was excited. What have you seen?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I haven’t seen a single one yet. Have you seen any?

Conrad Saam:

I’ve seen nothing. I really felt, I saw

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The examples. I saw the examples on search engine. It’s great.

Conrad Saam:

So my agency thinks I overreact to things and boy oh boy, I went back. I know hard to bleep, but I was like, listen guys, we got to be on top of this. Let’s make sure that everything’s lined up. And so far nothing’s happened. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Here’s an irony too. They just got rid of the Perspectives filter and they made it a forums tab. So that’s where apparently Reddit and Quo are going to die, but this Perspectives filter used to have all the social content and now that’s gone. So it’s like they’re taking away social content from the Perspectives filter they’re adding, they can’t make up their mind. They’re like, we don’t know what to do about TikTok. TikTok ISS taking all of our users and we think we should show some TikTok stuff in the results. And then we’re like, no, they’re taking all of our users. So now we’re going to take ’em out of the results. Maybe we’ll put it in Google business profiles, but we’re saying we’re going to, but it’s not really there because that’s another place we can hide social content. I don’t know what’s going on.

Conrad Saam:

All right. Yeah, we’ll see what happens. But for the listener tactically, I think there are a couple of things to note about this. Number one, Google is going to start sharing your social comments on Google business profile. At least that’s the announcement that was made. Although we have not really seen it in the wild, which means that if you’re saying stupid stuff on your profiles, that is unprofessional, that is going to be reflected when people do brand search for you. So be aware of that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Here’s my takeaway, you better diversify. If you’re all in on Google, you better start doing some social media,

Conrad Saam:

Okay? Diversify. Because

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Synergy, don’t put all your eggs in the Google basket. I’ve been doing SEOA relatively long time in my opinion, and historically I would say search has intent. It’s the best thing since sliced bread. But I got to tell you, they just elevated Liz Reed to head of search now. So there’s a changing of the guard because they’re started to feel the cracks in the armor.

Conrad Saam:

Diversify, brought to you by lunch, our legal marketing. Speaking of Google, which we never do,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We got to stop talking about Google. We’ll

Conrad Saam:

Give little too much. I know we’re going to stop. So this is the last one, and then we got two different things. Google March, 2024 spam update is done rolling out. Gyi, I believe you said you haven’t seen much in the legal industry and my data would concur with that. Have you seen anything meaningful about spam legal and the spam update from March, 2024?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Nope.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so from that, I assume that there is no spam in legal. Move on,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? If you did get hit by this spam update, please reach out to us. I want to hear from you. I know it’s hard and you don’t want to admit it. Maybe I’ll sign an NDA or something. So we won’t out. You don’t sign an D. I would love to hear about if you got a pure spam action on a legal website, if you’ve noticed massive drops because you think you were impacted by the helpful content update, please let us know because I’m just not seeing it.

Conrad Saam:

Gyi would like to interview your agency live on Lunch, Hour Legal marketing. If you’ve been whacked with a spam update,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well now no one’s going to send in their sites counter.

Conrad Saam:

We’ll do it kindly and anonymously. We’re going to do an anonymous question later on. We’re going to respect some privacy later on. So this is not unprecedented. This crossed my radar the other day. GoDaddy has launched, I want to call it aero, A IRO. I don’t know how to pronounce aero, but this is a do it yourself AI assisted website, stationary, your whole shebang, all the Chay booles that you would need to do your marketing. And I bring this up, not because I’m wanting to push people towards GoDaddy, but I do want to read this. It’s interesting. SEO from the help customers find you quickly with AI powered SEO, optimize site Rankings, draw traffic and break through the noise. Gyi, is that a bit too much to hope for in the competitive world of legal?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s bold, but GoDaddy is not the only company who’s creating AI website generators. There’s a bunch of ’em out there if you search for AI website generator, and gosh, I would definitely review before pushing publish, but I am actually really compelled by this nocturnal Animal Candles example that GoDaddy has on their landing page. So I’ll be checking this night dwellers company out because that’s

Conrad Saam:

Great. We put that in our monthly strategy session notes for our clients. That example specifically, it was. Anyway, we’ll throw a picture up later. And finally, Gyi, you and I had our first ever Lunch Hour Legal Marketing office hour session. How did that go for you?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I thought it was great. We got a lot of positive feedback. I’m super grateful for those that contributed both in advance to helping us get people to show up and then who did show up to ask questions. And in fact, we will be responding to at least one of those questions today in our listener question segment. And so when’s our next office hours, assuming we’re doing it again,

Conrad Saam:

It is the Friday after this episode comes out. So please

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Join us, keep your eyes peeled.

Conrad Saam:

You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on YouTube. I think we’ve got this hooked up to Facebook this time, 3 29 brought to you by Adam Lockwood. We get the little reminder down in the notes here, 3 29, join GUI and myself for office hours. Bring your questions, the more tactical, the better. And you’ll see that some of the questions we’re going to address, one of ’em now was highly tactical. Alright, when we come back, we’re going to talk about the Lawyer’s Guide to Conversions.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back and we are talking about conversion. Now, this is not the first time that Conrad and I have talked conversion. In fact, conversion confusion cleared up was the title of our April 14th, 2021 episode. And so go check that out. But I think this is always good to come back and revisit. I think conversion is such an important topic and as I was looking at the transcript, in fact, there’s some things that I might even take issue with that I said that maybe we can talk about today. But it’s top of mind for me because I had the good fortune of recording a webinar with Aaron Wiki of Lead Fno who gives some love to Aaron and lead Ferno, a cool tool. And we wanted to revisit this conversation. And so first, and I always make this really dumb law school joke. In fact, I just made it on LinkedIn. Scott Snellings picked up on it. But we’re not talking about the intentional tort here.

Conrad Saam:

Legal puns are always good key

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Law school jokes, never get old for lawyers. How would you define conversion today? I’m going to let you answer after I ran here for a second. But how I defined it back in 2021 I think might’ve been slightly misleading. How would you define it?

Conrad Saam:

So there are lots of ways that one can define a conversion. I think you need to come across a way that is most helpful and most applicable. And this is how we really talk about conversions with our clients from a marketing perspective, it is a booked consultation and that sits right in the middle of the marketing to kind of sales handoff. That’s an inflection point. And the reason I think this is so important to look at as a booked consultation is because there is some level of vetting that has been done. You’re not counting everything that comes across the transom, which a lot of agencies like to do, but from a marketing perspective, you’re also leaving the onus to turn that consultation into a paying client on the law firm. And so is this good enough of a lead? And we’ll talk about the difference between leads and conversions in a bit, but is this good enough of a lead that we actually want to sit down and talk with them? That to me is how we try from a marketing centric perspective to look at conversions and ideally do they turn into a client, all that kind of stuff. Yes, but if you’re really evaluating your marketing, I can’t come up with a better way than looking at booked consultations.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You walk right into my trap and I’m so grateful how damn you did it.

Conrad Saam:

This is pg, this was going to be a PG listing after the expletive laden rants that Gyi got me going on last week. I’m not sure if dammit qualifies for the explicit rating or not. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re not done yet. And I’ve considered a failure if I don’t get you to drop at least a couple colorful words in here. But I define it much the way that you defined it. I did the same thing. I’m looking back at this conversion confusion cleared up and this is exactly how I was talking about it too. And you know what? This is a great example of why you and I have blind spots. We’re agency owners, were probably curmudgeonly to a certain extent and we see other agencies reporting on conversions of things that don’t have the same value as a qualified consultation. And so we say, forget about all this other conversion nonsense. Don’t call anything else a conversion conversion’s a qualified consultation. And here’s the trap, that’s not what a conversion

Conrad Saam:

Is. I still haven’t seen it. I still haven’t seen the trap.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s not what a conversion is. Alright, go. A conversion is getting a visitor to take a desired action.

Conrad Saam:

Are you sitting in Mountain View? Google. Google. Am I talking to you? Google? Wait, so I’m

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Surprised

Conrad Saam:

You’re going doing it again. I feel like you’re going backwards again. I’m not seeing the track yet. You’re doing

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It again. You’re doing it again. I’m not saying to buy media based on a desired action. I’m not saying to report as a value metric. And this is what became clear in my conversation with Aaron today. There are all sorts of things that you should probably be thinking about doing from getting somebody to do something on your website, aside from trying to get everybody to call you. Because guess what? Not everybody is ready to get a free consultation or call you or text you or fill out your web form. That’s what marketing people do. Lots of people might be coming to your website for other reasons, and I’ll give you an easy one. We’re not going to talk about it today, but getting somebody to subscribe on a list, that’s a conversion.

Conrad Saam:

This is your, my CRM is bigger than your CRM argument that we’re going to revisit sometime in the near future.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t know what that means, but I want to hear more about it. Go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

I’m really struggling. So with

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re tainted. So I,

Conrad Saam:

It’s funny that you’ve got me speechless here because you’re a smart guy and I fundamentally disagree with where you’re going with it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Good. No, I’m glad that you do. Ultimately we’ll come to the same conclusion. You shouldn’t be measuring the effectiveness of your marketing on things like subscribers or followers or a

Conrad Saam:

Bunch of this is where we agree.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But here’s the issue. You can’t dismiss all that other stuff. That all plays a role in the marketing mix. It’s ultimately not a value metric. I’m not saying to go buy Google ads based on pixel fires. I’m not saying

Conrad Saam:

That I was going to come back to this as being really, I’m not saying that. So hold on, hold on. This is important. I thought I was going to get out of your trap by bringing this up. So I’ve been holding that powder and now you’ve preempted my counterpoint, but I want you to explain to the audience why you specifically said Google ads based on conversions and subscriptions. Why did you make that very clear point and why is that so dangerous?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I feel like we’re now getting into more of a word salad thing here than I

Conrad Saam:

Intended it’s word salad, but tactically it becomes really important.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, go ahead. So I would say this, let’s take the word conversion out of it altogether. You should buy media to a value metric, probably something like a qualified consultation. Some firms might buy media to an actual retained client. PI we’ve talked about. That’s difficult because, and all the things we’ve talked about with it. But all I’m trying to say is that’s one type of conversion. That’s one type of action. Perhaps the most valuable action. It’s probably the most valuable action that you want people to do. It’s probably the right action to be buying media to. It’s probably the right action to be optimizing most of your content strategy around trying to get people to actually take the action of contacting and hiring you. But it’s not the only one. And so what I’m trying to say is, and this is the balance of everything else, you and I, we’d love to shoot down keeping it PG 13.

Conrad Saam:

PG 13 today.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’d love to shoot down these vanity metrics. We’d love to say your agency’s lying to you because they’re tracking raw, organic traffic numbers or follower counts. But those actions, the actions of actually subscribing and following and engaging, those are actions that people are taking that you probably want to be as part of your marketing mix. I mean, are you recommending to clients that they strip everything off their website except a phone number because that’s the only way that they’re going to get qualified consultations? Of course not.

Conrad Saam:

I’m going back super tactical to my counter, my major counterpoint where I think people really get this screwed up and Google encourages it and it goes back to your conversions and your media buy with Google ads. So conversion, which we have been talking about as leads, phone call form, fill text or chat, you’re talking about something like a subscription button, right? And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m talking about any action that you might want to get somewhere to take beyond just a qualified consultation.

Conrad Saam:

So my problem with this is when you use Google Analytics to track those conversions, whatever they might be, and by the way, and I believe this gets nefarious, Google goes out of your way to make it very easy to set up these conversion tracking metrics. Very, very easy. When you feed that back into Google ads, what it’s going to do is find people who like signing up for newsletters or whatever non I’m going to hire a lawyer conversion you may have set up. And that is amazingly dangerous and it happens all the time and you’re optimizing for a conversion that isn’t someone who’s going to hire you as a law firm. And that absolutely pollutes the data that is going back into your Google Ads account. And that to me is massive, massively problematic.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A hundred percent agree with you, and lemme give you some worse news. Most law firms aren’t even feeding their conversion data back into Google ads anyway.

Conrad Saam:

Yes,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Showing your tainted worldview that I share as well. So we agree on that. I’m really just trying to open it up to say, Hey, look, let’s talk about some other things you might think about. And there’s overlap here, right? Because when you start talking about conversion best practices, what are some things just off the top of your head, simple, like 1 0 1 conversion stuff that you think about when you’re trying to improve conversion.

Conrad Saam:

I’ll give you two numbers. What is your phone call answer rate? 99% of the listeners here do not know what that is. If you think it’s good, you don’t know what the number is. If you think it’s bad, you might know what the number is. Number two, what is your sales velocity between each of the steps of your funnel? How quickly are you moving people through? How responsive are you? And by the way, those responsive numbers, that sales velocity, that is different. We just talked about this with Texan, Aaron, Mikey, those responses are different for phone call form, fill, text or chat. You’re responding at different rates and you should know what those different rates are because they impact the overall likelihood that someone converts into a client.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So funny. It’s so funny and I do the same thing and those things. That’s all very, very good practical tips. Do either of those things impact the likelihood that someone’s going to take an action on your website?

Conrad Saam:

No. No, sorry. So this is why we’re worth salad around the right conversion.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s why you keep going to conversion to client, which again, I’m with you on, but let’s back up. What are things that you can do? That’s why I wanted to get rid of the word conversion for a second. Ah, okay. What are things you can do to improve the rate? Because I don’t want to use the word C word to improve the rate which visitors take a desired action on your website,

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to give you an important answer that we covered last podcast.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay?

Conrad Saam:

You want to drive traffic that is likely to convert, which may mean you lower your overall traffic volume, you lower the denominator, but you improve both the absolute and the rate at which people contact you. How

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do you do that?

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so let me give a very, very clear example of that. You may have a bunch of content on your website that has nothing to do with hiring a law firm and that content, I would argue, and we have seen this and I’ve written articles, we’ll find this an old search engine land article. Actually there’s two that I wrote called, I think it was called Less Traffic, more Clients, parts one and two, where you actually concentrate on the, I’m a transactional website where people are going to hire a lawyer instead of I am about reviews of Little Italy and New York or I am about very tangential things to the law. Now we covered this on our last pod, but it’s really focusing your traffic and this is very much a bigger is not better. More traffic is not necessarily better. In fact, it is worser both in the absolute and the worser in the absolute and the percentage level of conversion. Now then you have on-page stuff, is it easy for people to connect with you? Are you making it available to them in different ways that they want to connect to you? An obvious one is you’re a family lawyer. You might not want to just have a phone number as the way people connect with you because I might be at home thinking of leaving my spouse and I’m probably not going to pick up the phone, but I might fill out a form fill, right? That’s all obvious and it’s different by demographic, et cetera, et cetera.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Make it easy. So you say it’s obvious, but this is kind of why I wanted to talk about this today because we look at millions of law, maybe not millions, but lots of law firm websites, millions

From the things that you just said, and I was looking at my notes from my, with the webinar with Aaron and you hit a lot of ’em. Contact options. I don’t see regularly a lot of contact options. I see phone and form. I don’t regularly see text. I don’t regularly see live chat. I don’t regularly see, subscribe to get whatever it is that you want to give them. I don’t regularly see some people are doing the lead magnet thing with some guide downloads. Simplicity. You’ve said simplicity. That’s a huge one. And oftentimes I’ll look at a website and I’m like, I don’t even know what they want me to do. The other thing that you mentioned that it was kind of baked in there, and I think this one is one of the most important things that relates to the call to action is the offer.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, okay, go call to action. I was just about to bring this up, but what do you mean? Go ahead. No,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You go.

Conrad Saam:

You go. No, no, no. Then I’m going to disagree with you. Go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay. I think that everybody’s got the same call to action. Okay. Sometimes it’s really bad, it’s just contact. Just contact. Sometimes it’s free consultation.

Conrad Saam:

Well, hold on. Why do you think that’s really bad that it’s just contact? What do you mean by it’s just contact?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re setting zero expectation about what someone should expect when they actually contact you

Conrad Saam:

About what they should expect when they contact you. Okay, yeah. Okay. I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Think free consultation is a slight improvement to contact. Okay. And here’s my bigger point is there’s no offer benefit value part of it in the CTA, it’s the same thing. Everybody’s doing the same thing, so it doesn’t stand out.

Conrad Saam:

This is a question I’m going to give away my bias by asking the question.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

Do you think at the bottom of a page, a well-written SEO page about car accident lawyer in Huntsville, Alabama, you should have a paragraph that says, if you or anyone has been injured in a car accident in Huntsville, Alabama, please call the attorneys at Smith and Jones by using this phone number that’s also at the top right hand corner of my website.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do you think that’s No. You’re missing your No, you’re totally missing the point. No,

Conrad Saam:

The point is, my point here is that you guys, I’ve just talked to a bunch of social media people about this, you don’t need to tell people to pick up the phone to call you, right? It’s wasted words. It drives me bananas. People are not so stupid to be like, well, that’s a really informative article about Huntsville, Alabama car accident lawyers. Man, yesterday I got hit by a car, what should I do?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Be? Nobody’s even reading that page, by the way, even if you’ve got conversion data on that page, it’s just because they landed on it and called because they saw the phone number at the top of your page.

Conrad Saam:

So no one’s not calling you because there’s no CTA is my point. I hate the CTAs.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

All I’m saying is, and again, there’s some nuance here because you painted a very clear picture of what not to do. Totally agree. How about this though, in addition to or on the contact page, you set some expectations about when they can expect a response. Great. And whether or not the initial consultation is free, because guess what? It’s not clear from your website because it just says contact. And so I’m scared to contact you because I’ve never hired a lawyer before. And all it says is contact.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, bring them further down.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How about some social proof, like some testimonials or some reviews on your website? No, get rid of that too. Just a phone number. No, I

Conrad Saam:

Like it. I like it. Trust marks. Improve conversion rates. Even your fake awards improve your conversion rate.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They might, but they’re not as good as, not as good as a testimonial in my opinion. And to me, if I had to pick the contact options is the biggest problem. Everybody wants to force people who don’t want to be in their funnel into their automated funnel because it’s more efficient. So that’s what we do. We tell everybody to go fill out the form and we’ll get back to you at our convenience. That’s a great way to kill your conversion rate. Mic dropped.

Conrad Saam:

Here’s my mic drop. I know this across my clients and across marketing channels, and the number is different by different marketing channel as my pay-per-click person will remind me every time I say this publicly, it’s better in pay-per-click because people have purchase intent, 83% of the leads. And by leads I mean phone call form, fill, text or chat. 83% of the leads that we track into our client’s systems do not turn into a consultation. But then

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Of that 83%, there’s different reasons they’re not

Conrad Saam:

Because most of them are not new prospective clients. And my bias, my mic drop, I hate this marketing industry that we are part of, Gyi, is that digital marketing agencies like to report on the a hundred percent that are counted as leads because they are phone call form, field text or chat, regardless of whether or not it’s someone looking for a date in China, they filled out the form. So it’s a lead, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And that’s, you’re so tainted. I

Conrad Saam:

Just hate this industry and it happens all the time. So if you’re looking at leads, 83% of that data is garbage. We now need to move on. Or Adam is going to pull out the virtual shepherd crook and take us off stage. Let’s take a, when we come back, we will be answering some user questions about LSAs.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hey everybody, 3 29. We’re doing another Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing office hours. If you came to our last one, bring a friend, bring your questions. We want to make sure that it’s super tactical for your specific issues. Also check out the Bite Lunch Hour Legal Marketing newsletter. You can find [email protected] slash lhm email. We’ll put it in the show notes. Apologize to those who have had some trouble finding it. We’ll try to publicize that more. But hope to see you in those two new Lunch Hour Legal Marketing spots.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, Gyi, now that we’ve talked about conversions, we’re going to go back to questions about advertising from the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing office hours. We have two great questions and we are not going to name names here, but we will answer them in details.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, we can name Rory. We owe Rory an apology, but the other one will be anonymous.

Conrad Saam:

We owe an apology.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, he submitted a question and we didn’t answer it during office hours, so we’re answering it now.

Conrad Saam:

There was so much demand for our brilliant brains that we didn’t get to all the questions, including one from Rory phe, trial lawyer and injury and criminal defense attorney. I’m going to read this out to you and I would love your response. How long do you think Google LSAs will remain king for small firms, at least for criminal defense or what’s on the horizon? I’m paying $200 a qualified. Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about Rory and where he is and what he does because this seems like a good deal to me. That’s a brief aside. I’m paying about $200 a qualified DUI lead, which is honestly still pretty darn good, but it used to be like 50 to a hundred bucks and eventually it’s just going to not be worth it. So how long Gyi are LSAs king for the small criminal defense attorney?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They’re going to be king as long as they show up above everything else on the search engine result page for qualified non-brand queries. But will they still be have a return on ad spend? That’s a tougher question. And look, it’s just like clicks folks. It’s a little further down the funnel that you’re paying for leads instead of clicks. Yes, you can try to dispute some of them, but we know lead gen, this is auction-based lead gen. The cost per lead is going to go up auction-based lead gen. So it’s going to be good for you until the cost to acquire that auction-based lead client is more than what your target cost for acquisition is.

Conrad Saam:

Alright Rory, my advice to you is to, I’m not sure what market you’re in. Let’s say you’re in Nebraska. I would flood the Nebraska social media airways where lawyers who are competitors hang out asking about whether or not the LSAs that cost you about $2,000 a call are worth it. And I would continue to accept those $200 a call and make as much money as you possibly can. I think the economics are going to catch up with you to a point where you’ll be like, I miss those good old days of $200 costs per calls for my LSAs. That’s my take.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Just like we missed those good old days of $5 cost per clicks.

Conrad Saam:

That’s right. $5 cost per click bought to you by nobody except for your brand competitors. Alright, the next person, I got another question for you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s good.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Oh wait. Which then your agency claims is actually for DUI lawyer Nebraska, right? You

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Might actually already be paying for those brand leads through LSAs because you have opted in to show your LSAs

Conrad Saam:

For your brand searches. Okay, so this was our last pod. We’ll put this in the show notes, but if you are unaware, go listen to the last pod where we talked about Google now deliberately conflating as they did in pay-per-click your brand terms with head terms. They’re now doing that with LSAs and they opted everyone in, more people in the market raising price. So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

$200 a lead for a brand lead is not as good as $200 a lead for a non-brand lead.

Conrad Saam:

And Gyi, where would I go to find out whether or not I’m paying $200 for my brand leads in LSAs versus the head terms? Where would I see that information?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You will have to call Conrad or email Conrad because he’s the only one who can possibly figure it out

Conrad Saam:

And I have no clue. Nobody knows, which makes me wonder what you’re paying for. Okay. I’m still keeping a PG here. We’re doing well.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Close, close,

Conrad Saam:

We’re doing well. You got me right on the border. Alright, this brought to you by somebody who we’re not going to name, but she asked a great question. I’m going to read this out to you and there are a lot of different ways to unpack this. Gyi, I run Google LSAs for my baby. I opened on 8 23, so congratulations, you’ve lasted six months. We hope this goes for another six years. My baby estate planning firm, my optimization score keeps dropping and one of the primary recommendations Google makes is to increase my budget. Really, you don’t say, when I look at the analytics of the ad, it shows limited by budget and then the top advertisers showing at the top of the page in my auctions, the top advertisers are Sonara, who by the way is a large advertiser in the injury world, rocket Lawyer and finelaw. Does that mean I’m competing with these behemoths for ad space? Why don’t they compare me to other EP firms in my area? Estate planning. I want to know who my competition is locally, not from national firms or companies. Does Google want me to increase my budget to compete with those large firms and national companies? Gyi, there’s a lot to unpack there. I have so many thoughts. What’s your off the cuff?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, couple thoughts. First of all, it looks like we might be conflating LSAs and Google Ads to my knowledge does not give you top advertiser insights that Google Ads

Conrad Saam:

Does and further Rocket matter and FindLaw as directories and software would not be showing up in,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? So let’s dive into the Google Ads. Part of this one issue is that if, so one issue is, as Conrad laughed as he was reading it, Google’s insight is always to raise your budget and always to raise your cost per click because that is how Google makes money.

Conrad Saam:

Hey Gyi, I’ve developed a rash under my armpit, what should I do? Google says, raise your advertising budget.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Exactly. The second thing, when they’re showing competitors, and this is an important one, we were wondering what your targeting looks like because, so one, you’ve got a personal injury lawyer showing up in the mix, rocket Lawyer and FindLaw, and we are a little bit skeptical that maybe the targeting options you have selected are not targeting specifically enough that those would not be, certainly Shaara would not be listed as a competitor. Conrad, what do you got?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, I mean I suspect there is either limited targeting on your part or this conflation is happening, this deliberate conflation of, in this case, I mean we literally have a lawyer software and a directory all being munged into the same place and the same competition. I think you can do better targeting to ensure that that does not happen. However, it’s very possible that, so for example, FindLaw is trying to arbitrage by traffic and sell traffic at different rates, buy low, sell high. And that is possible. I did that for AVO back in the day. We would buy traffic and redeliver that value at a higher rate. That’s not an unreal thing. If that is what is going on, you can monetize that traffic at a much better rate than a directory, Ken. And so I would think about that, but the fact that we have three different competitors that Google is showing as competitors that are in three different categories suggests to me that your targeting is off and or Google is just showing you the big guys in the market spending a whole bunch of money in an effort to entice you to do the same.

And that I think is unfortunate. But I do think a lot of this comes down to whether or not this is a targeting on your own side perspective. My gut tells me, and I mean this in no offense, that you probably have not set up your Google ads with enough specificity and granularity to avoid those types of targeting. And this is not on you. This is 100% on Google in their expansion of how they look at terms and where they believe there is similarity in terms where it doesn’t belong. Let’s say that nicely. How’s that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So Connor, another question in here. How should she go about figuring out who her local competitors are in ads or what are some ways she might be able to do that?

Conrad Saam:

Well, there’s lots of different third party tools, most of which are delightfully inaccurate. My favorite third party tool to use to determine who’s actually advertising is to run a bunch of queries and see who shows up both in the LSAs and Google Ads and make a list of that group. And then you can go to third party tools to try and ascertain what their actual budget is. That’s one way. However, the search impression share number is actually really fascinating for me. The individuals playing in the game are less important than what your frequency of advertising is. And that’s your search impression, which basically says when someone has done a query for which I’m advertising, am I showing up or not? And one of the ways to actually increase that search impression share is to decrease the number of impressions in which you should be showing up by tightening up the granularity of those terms that you are bidding on. And most of the time people are excited about expanding things because growing and we want more, we want to be in front of more people. The system by and large encourages you to do that by showing up for queries for which people are not looking to hire an estate planning lawyer, which is again why I suspect you are getting advertisers competitors listed as not actually being competitors to your firm.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great points, I’m with you for the quick and dirty. Do it yourself. If you’re looking for competitors, just perform searches, see who shows up. The tools don’t really start to kick in until you’ve got really big budget and you’re doing more sophisticated buying. And I think the other thing too to bring up, since we’re talking Google ads, this is back to our conversation about the C word. If you’re going to run Google ads, I hope that you are feeding back to the machine the leads that are coming into you that are actually qualified leads and not pixel fires or worst case. Oftentimes we see there’s just no conversion event, right? It’s just run the ads without any kind of accountability on the media. And then you really start to see things get out of control because you’ve got close variant issues, you’ve got targeting issues, you’ve got who knows what’s going on. And that will all play out in terms of what Google’s going to recommend too. So as bad as the recommendations from Google Ads are, they get even worse if you’re not feeding in actual qualified conversion data back to the machine.

Conrad Saam:

Do you see how Gyi beautifully tied this episode in a bow? We started with conversions, we ended with ads, and that was masterfully done, sir. Well played.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Couldn’t have done it without you and it couldn’t have done it without our listeners for submitting awesome questions. So thank you so much for that. As always, if you do have questions, please show up to office hours, subscribe and respond to our newsletter. And of course you can always hashtag us or reach out to us directly for Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing.

Conrad Saam:

And as we take our leave, we’d like to say Ben Glass, thanks for sharing how you’re doing. You’ve impacted a lot of people out there in the legal marketing world and we’re thinking of you. I hope you have a good recovery and you’ve been very open with everyone and so hope you’re doing well. We are both thinking of you. Hope you’re back on the soccer pitch, blowing the whistle and yelling at parents soon.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Get well, Ben,

Speaker 3:

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 via Apple Podcasts and RSS, follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That was great.

Conrad Saam:

Loved it. That was awesome. And I haven’t sworn yet.

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