10 ESSENTIAL Digital Marketing Tools for Lawyers (MUST HAVE!)

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, you are in another hotel room, which means you are at a conference. Where are you?

Conrad Saam:

I am at Ilma, which is honestly, I think this was the 15th Ilma Super Summit bootcamp. I’m not quite sure what the names are anymore, but I’m at Pilama in New Orleans. Great event. Absolutely fantastic. I love coming to New Orleans. It’s kind of gritty and dirty and I like it. It’s much more,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I love New Orleans too.

Conrad Saam:

It’s just so good. And I love the genuine deep music everywhere. I mean it’s cliche, but game on all day long. I love it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So did you have a session topic?

Conrad Saam:

I did not. Wow. I feel, feel the next question coming on. I did not have a session topic. I didn’t speak at Peloma this time.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, so you didn’t pay.

Conrad Saam:

I did not pay to pitch.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I actually don’t know if that’s true of PIL or not. Right. Does Pilama have sponsored speaking?

Conrad Saam:

There certainly was some pitching from the stage, but I will say this, the content and the conference, I’ve been to probably seven or eight PMA events. This is the first one that I didn’t speak at. I’m just here as a casual observer and a super good conference.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, great lineup. And I’ve actually never been to a pulma and really, maybe I should buy a ticket. Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

Maybe you should buy a speaking spot

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Or just maybe I’ll just be an observer. I like being an observer.

Conrad Saam:

Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

All alright. Enough about Peloma. Good job, Hilma. What else we got?

Conrad Saam:

So we are as usual starting out with the news. We are then going to step on the digital scale of your website and do a segment called Is Your Website Overweight? And this is really a response to what we have seen in the industry being a push to not reduce page count on websites. And then I’m looking forward to this one. We are going, Tim, the tool man Taylor grew up and got a job as an SEO, what is in the digital marketing toolbox for Gyi and Conrad

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And what makes the world go round?

Speaker 3:

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 always, we are going to start with the news and back by popular demand requests from both Gyi and myself is the old timey news drop. Love it. Gyi, Google io search results. What’s happening?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I sat through some of Google IO yesterday, that’s the Google’s developer conference. You can go check it out. I encourage people to spend at least a little time checking it out and we’ll drop a link to at least a couple of relevant updates. But they spend a lot of time talking about how awesome their technology is and multimodal and showed some cool examples. The Gemini era. It’s very exciting. But everybody’s curious about what this impact on search is going to be. I guess we’re going to have to really, and they talk about it and I don’t want to cast aspersions or to be dismissive. They did say a few things about it, but the headline is, is that they’re rebranding search generative experiences as AI overviews. And I brought it up and I keep dragging Conrad into the SG stuff. Conrad’s like there’s no SG results and Conrad’s, right?

But they are saying that they’re out in the wild. Now, the SEO chatter still hasn’t seen a ton of them yet, but as far as Google’s concerned, the AI overviews are out there. And one of the big questions is, do the AI overviews steal clicks, right? Is it zero click because, and there’s been some illusions that it’s actually increasing clicks. Users like these AI overviews and are clicking through to the websites TBD. But I will tell you, as I’ve told you, you can go listen to our episodes. We’ve covered SG a couple different times, but monitor what’s going on for relevant queries in your neck of the woods so far in my neck of the woods, it’s still mostly Forbes.

Conrad Saam:

And we would look Forbes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh my gosh. Forbes is killing an SEO. I’m just telling you

Conrad Saam:

I’m fine until you said

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Forbes, dude killing it there. Go follow me on Twitter. I’m showing screenshots. Almost every best lawyers near me has got Forbes top five in traditional organic results.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, brought to you by Gyi and Conrad, please go pay someone to put you on Forbes. That’s embarrassing. Alright, chat GPT-4 0.0. That announcement came out. What came out of that? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Similar. So this is it. We’re in the AI wars here, right? I’m curious to see where Apple lives in all this, but OpenAI and Microsoft partnered up in Bing and there are a bunch of new, so one they’re giving now this omni multimodal GPT away for free. So everybody’s got access to the new 4.0 and you can still have the paid subscriptions give you some more. I think they gives you API access and more usage, so to speak. Everyone wants to talk about AI and it’s like, well how do you use this ai? And frankly, I don’t know how you are land on this Conrad, but it’s still a lot of the same types of things. Now are you going to be able to do video with it? Are you going to be able to do images with it? Are you going to be able to do more advanced text ideation and stuff with Yes.

Are there a whole bunch of issues? Yes, yes. Is it cutting edge technology? Yeah, it’s pretty remarkable. Is it doing what a lot of people think it’s doing? No. And there was some turnover at their board, right? Ilia, and I’m blanking on the other scientists name who left, but two of the board members who are open AI people are gone and there’s some questions about why they left. And there’s a new person on their super alignment team, which is supposed to keep the AI from killing us TBDI guess on that one. So we can’t hedge against the apocalypse.

Conrad Saam:

We’ll let you know when that happens.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’ll know there’ll be no more lunch. Hour, Legal, Marketing.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, speaking of the apocalypse local service ads, we have been bashing local service ads two episodes in a row and we’re going to make it three. This I think is an under seen underreported, underused unaware that through LSAs there is a functionality to contact multiple attorneys, which as Gyi will tell you, is actually good for the consumer. Now they’re getting three or four different perspectives instead of just one on the advertising side. The thing that pisses me off about this is again, there is absolutely no insight into what you’re paying for. What are now three very different inbound lead types coming out of LSAs. First one would be a direct phone call, which is what everyone kind of thinks LSAs are. You’re happy to pay for that phone call if it’s a qualified lead, and if it’s not, you can dispute it. Okay, fine. The second one is paying for that inbound for your brand, which should cost you a lot less.

But as we discussed in our previous episode, we think is somewhere around 150 to $200 per inbound for someone who’s already looking for you, which is insane. But because they don’t break these things out, you have no idea. And finally, with this multiple messaging thing, if that lead, and this starts to look like the lead providers, Google starts to look like these lead providers, or I’ve been mean to engage about this, but taking a single lead and sending it to multiples, and again, you have no idea what you’re paying for this. It makes it very, very difficult to understand and realize how to optimize for LSAs. Now, I don’t want to go too deep into this, Gyi, but your perspective is look at the big average. Make sure that your LSAs are cost effective and play the game.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I mean Ls A stands for larger shareholder accretion for Google,

Conrad Saam:

I called it. Let’s Screw Attorneys.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You did. And look, there are, as we discussed, lots of attorneys. This is not going to be a good channel for, but I’ll tell you, I think back to my early internet marketing days, 2007 and the days of total attorneys and Total Attorneys, it was a lead gen. In fact, I just saw a total attorneys ads. They’re owned by internet brands now, but I saw they’re internet brands. Oh,

Conrad Saam:

Which also owns what? Engage as well. Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Interesting. Yeah, they a bunch of lawyers do com,

Conrad Saam:

Avo.com, AVO

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Martindale.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Anyway, but I remember and they sold the lead multiple times and we know where selling the lead multiple times goes and the consequences. And so I’m putting things into three big buckets. Bucket one is turn off your LSAs. You don’t have to participate, you don’t have to play the game, you don’t have to do LSAs. Great, okay,

Conrad Saam:

Don’t whine if you’re not going to play the game.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Bucket two is I want to play the, we’ll call it the efficient LSA game. So you opt out a brand and you turn off messages and see what you get. Get as much as you can. You’re getting phone calls, correct me if I’m wrong, but they’re not doing multiple phone calls yet. That’s coming though you watch because Total Attorneys did the same thing. Multi ring,

Conrad Saam:

It’s coming, whoever picks it up fastest,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Fast. So that’s bucket three. Bucket three is I know my economics, I’m a big spender. I’m trying to incrementally capture more and more market share. Message is on brands opted in. I’m answering everything within seconds. I’m disputing where I can dispute and I know big picture all in on LSAs, my cost per client target works for my business.

Conrad Saam:

And I would say that the most cost effective way to do this, and I’m making the assumption that you are overpaying for your branded terms and that you are overpaying for those multiple message terms. The most cost-effective highest, I hate to say this word, highest return on investment and or lowest cost. Don’t say it, cost per client,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Don’t do

Conrad Saam:

It. Your lowest, lowest cost per client of these models is to turn everything off other than those phone calls.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And it’ll also be your second lowest volume to turning model

Conrad Saam:

Together that I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Was going.

Conrad Saam:

So the question becomes, if you play that game, do you get whacked? Because you’ll disappear from

Gyi Tsakalakis:

LSH in a competitive place, you’re going to be looking at four to 5% search impression share is my guess. Now look, you’re in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, you might be able to dominate. You got a lot of reviews, you might dominate. You might be closer to 80, 90% search impression share, but not in Chicago, not PI in Chicago.

Conrad Saam:

So this is philosophical theoretical. We will get some data in and share it with you. Okay, we’ve gone too far on LSAs. Again, I apologize if our next pod we can get to the whole pod without saying LSA. We’ll do something nice. How’s that? Alright, let’s try the next thing. Gyi, the next major piece of news, we were cited as one of the best legal marketing podcast. I’m so proud.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Congratulations.

Conrad Saam:

Proud congratulations to us and the 15 other legal marketing podcasts that were listed on the best legal marketing podcast list.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if you’re looking for an example of how not to use AI to generate your content, check out some of these best lists.

Conrad Saam:

We will put this out there. So the reason I chuckle and Gefa is that this was either written by someone who do any research at all, or this was entirely written by ai, which did a bunch of incorrect research. And I know this because the writeup for this lovely podcast that you listen to, I will read this to you. The podcast features interviews with leading legal marketing experts and thought leaders. We haven’t featured an interview for a long, long time. And we do that deliberately because we think they turned into gross pitches all the time, which is so you just get me and Gyi. And so the one thing that makes us a bit unique, they got wrong anyway.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I also like how they interchangeably, sometimes they’ll actually name a host and then sometimes they’ll just say buy legal talk network. So either they actually don’t listen to the podcast at all or it is funny, I typed in 16 good legal podcasts in the chat if you teach us to see if it was exactly, but it’s not exactly the same. But anyway, hey, you know what? Maybe we should just be grateful.

Conrad Saam:

No, don’t be grateful, be cynical. I will read you three other titles from the same. The legal practice.com. One is called 17 Law Firm Marketing Books for Modern Attorneys. Another page is called Legal Legends, the 17 best legal marketing books of 2024. And next there is 17 best books for expanding your law firm. And the lists intermingle, but not exactly. So this is an example of AI content gone wrong.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Somebody’s been reading SEO listicle blog posts.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, I hate this industry sometimes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Speaking of this industry, here’s two events you might want to check out. We have the Law Firm Growth Summit coming up on May 21st through 23rd. So probably just kicking off as we publish this episode, right? Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

Hit pause, sign up because you can hear both more Conrad and Gyi to the law firm Gross Summit. And also I would encourage you, if you are in the Detroit market, this is a must if you want to come to Detroit, no one’s ever really like, yes, I’m going to put that in a city on my list. Sorry, Detroit, when is that? Gyi. And I might be making a guest appearance with a bottle of scotch

Gyi Tsakalakis:

June 24th. We hope to see you there. Come to Detroit, great lineup, and we’ll be talking local shop if you like local SEO, this is the event for you. And also Conroe will be there to heckle and throw hats. Let our legal marketing hats into the audience. But because you’re getting kicked out of your hotel room, let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:

Alright everyone, let’s be very clear. I’m not getting thrown out of my hotel room due to a cocaine infused ba analia of silliness in New Orleans. It’s because I got a flight to catch. I’m going home for my daughter’s 17th birthday. Alright, this segment are talking about is your website overweight? And we’ve touched on this concept a couple of times, but we’re going to come back because we keep seeing content about not deleting content from your own website. And we want to dive deep because I think people are misguided here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is important because Conrad is very passionate about content hygiene and Conrad. Why don’t you start off and tell us, give us some context on content hygiene. So why is content hygiene, can’t you? I have a website, I want my website to get traffic, I make more pages. What’s this whole concept of content hygiene?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I think when people talk about content hygiene and content strategy, we are so focused on making more that we sometimes forget to think that less can actually be more. I’ve been doing this for a very, very long time and the reason it’s so relevant, and anyone who’s been in the SEO game for a long time knows that this is relevant because they dealt with things like the Panda update, right? There was Panda and Penguin and we talked about la. There are all these Google algo updates that were all named after animals that most of them had something to do with the quality of content. And the issue was low quality content can have a site-wide impact, which means if you have a garbage piece of content, it doesn’t just hurt that page, that page just isn’t going to not surface. It actually is a site-wide negative impact.

And I wrote two posts, and this goes back to 2016. So this is not a new strategy that I believed in as a recent thing. It’s something I’ve been doing for a very long time. But there’s two posts on search engine land called More Content Less Traffic. And I do two case studies on this of how we took a website and deliberately dropped the page count and saw a change in traffic. But ultimately more important, a improvement in conversions. And by conversions, I mean contacts, leads to a law firm and that’s what really matters. And so in many cases, we miss the boat and think about as SEOs, our more traffic is going to be better. There’s more people we can retarget to. There’s all sorts of things, but it’s not really always the case. And I would argue it’s not only not better, it can actually be deleterious to your site.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I think the two points here that I don’t want the audience to miss, you’re saying you got rid of pages, which we’re going to talk about how you decided to do that in a second. Traffic went down and you said conversions went up, but you didn’t just mean better conversion rate, you actually meant the volume, the number of conversions, the number of, I’m assuming you’re talking qualified leads, qualified consultations, the volume of those actually went up as well.

Conrad Saam:

So this is really fascinating, but it makes sense if you think through some of the stupid content that people have put out there. And by the way, this is going to come across as a massively self-serving segment.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So the usual, so

Conrad Saam:

The usual, but this is probably over the top because I think this is a counter perspective of what many SEOs believe and preach to their law firms. But I’ve got the data to back it up. And we just did this, we did this at a, I don’t want to call this, this was probably an extreme example. I just posted a case study on this. This is a PI firm. We cut 77% of their pages. And what they have seen is a very, very small impact on traffic, but a tripling of their leads. So the only conjecture I can make from this, and I know the content that we struck, the only conjecture I can make from this, and this is not the only time we’ve done this, but this was the most extreme example. And again, it’s a self-serving thing, which is why we publish case studies about this stuff like cherry pick the good things.

But by getting rid of a bunch of content that really wasn’t about, I want to hire a lawyer right now, we have concentrated improve the quality of the traffic that does show up and they are now contacting the firm at a much greater rate. And that has been, I mean it’s dramatic now, this took 12 months to work itself out. So this is not a flip switch kind of thing. And it’s taken time, but it’s really, we’ve gone from, I think it was a 2.2% conversion rate off of organic to almost 7%, sorry, like 6.5%. And it’s just astonishing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, again, this is the thing to me that we atactually drive home this point. It’s not just that the conversion rate is better because of course the conversion rate’s better. You just got rid of a bunch of irrelevant traffic. So of course the conversion rate went up, but the actual number of conversions, the actual number of the value metric, which by the way you just flippantly said that SEO’s measure there’s performance by traffic, which is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,

Conrad Saam:

Sorry, bad SEOs.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How about, I don’t want to call it bad, bad marketing directors losing the forest for the trees maybe. I don’t know. Again, a law firm, the performance objective for a law firm, the KPI for a law firm is not grow your website, it’s not make your website bigger. It’s not get traffic for more traffic’s sake, right? I mean, you talk about the pizza law firm, right?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. I’m going to use two very obvious examples for you guys because you guys think the content is the thing. We have a client is in New York and sorry, but we did an audit of their site. They’re in New York, they rank really well and get a lot of traffic for deep dish pizza because they’ve got content about deep dish pizza restaurants in and around Manhattan. Why would you think that that is going to be,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Especially because New York pizza is not deep dish.

Conrad Saam:

It may be content around deep dish. First you’re going to Chicago,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

New York

Conrad Saam:

Argument. It

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Wouldn’t matter either way,

Conrad Saam:

But it’s so obvious that that is stupid. Now what I hear from some people is like, oh, well that’s more people that we can retarget. That’s more people. We can cut our brand.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s what I said, I think got a previous episode and I was really just saying it to give some kind of justification for why maybe there’s something of value you’re squeezing out of this. But again, tell ’em why it’s wrong.

Conrad Saam:

Well, because no one looking for a deep dish pizza just got hit by a car. I mean the Venn diagram overlap is fairly limited. And what happens is when a computer starts thinking that your site is about deep dish pizza, they think you are much less about getting T-boned by a Cadillac, right? That’s,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And that’s the real issue. That’s the real problem, is that if your objective is earn business clients from people using search engines, then content that is not relevant could be detracting from your ability to do that. Again, not overall traffic, not size of your websites, not a bunch of other SEO metrics that we could rattle off that have nothing to do with anything. So quickly, because we’re running out of time for our segment, give me your process for deciding what stays and what goes

Conrad Saam:

Well. So it’s a painful process especially. So it starts with a very rudimentary blunt instrument, which is a site column search. How big is your site? How many pages do you have? I talked to a firm at pulma, they’ve got 2,600 pages on their site. So now we have a big fat site. I’m pretty sure not all those pages are getting traffic. So we can look for traffic going to those pages. We can then look for links going to those pages. We can then look for the relevancy of some of those pages. A great example of a useless page is Mary Jones won the Super Lawyers 2018 award, right? So we’ve been taught to blog. So we blog every time we win the Super Lawyers Award. And Mary Jones left the firm three years ago and now you’re ranking for her name, but you’re not because no one’s looking for Mary Jones’ 2018 Super Lawyers Award.

It’s just stupid. It’s content that doesn’t belong. It’s not spam content, it’s just dated useless content that no one cares about. And when you do those things and you look for those things, it’ll be so obvious in many cases, this content needs to be either killed or consolidated and some of it needs to be kept. But we look for those things and then you thin out the size of the site and what find. And this was my 2016 study. There’s two examples. I’ve got two examples with case study. Number one pages down 32%, traffic up 36%. The other one is pages down 63% traffic up 61%. So I mean, it’s almost depending on how bad this site is, you can look at an increase in traffic by getting rid of some of the garbage and SEOs who don’t think that part of your content strategy needs to be a regular analysis review and purge of useless pages. You are optimizing for the wrong KPI.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if you don’t believe Conrad, I’m going to read directly from Google’s search developer documentation. Removing unhelpful content might contribute to your other pages performing better. That’s Google, not Conrad. So take it or leave it. Remember folks, if you are marketing a law firm, you’re not growing a website, you’re growing a law firm. Let’s take a break

Conrad Saam:

And now review from Todd Ver Weir, the man in Texas who has the best law firm logo that represents Texas. Check it out. It’s a good one. All right, here’s what Todd, I appreciate the thought and advice provided along with the willingness to say, sorry, I missed that one. Too often digital marketing companies will use less than accurate headlines, blurbs, or tactics to promise rankings and a gazillion dollars. It’s refreshing to hear folks talk about things from a substantive standpoint, not a superficial one. And by willing to disagree with each other, yet respect each other’s opinions. Now, if you’ll just show up at CLE Con in Austin this year, we can enjoy some Tex-Mex barbecue, or maybe some Texas whiskey. I am all three. Clio has amazingly been really dragging their feet at naming the speakers for CLE Con. I hope to be there. I hope to be.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ll be there. And I just got the email saying, I will not be speaking.

Conrad Saam:

You’ll not be speaking. I didn’t get the email saying I’m not be speaking, so maybe I’ll be speaking. Good luck. Good luck. Alright, we’ll let you know later on, Gyi will not be speaking. The good thing about Clio, this is not a pay to pitch situation. So Clio Khan does really carefully select their speakers except for not including Gyi. Good

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lord, man. One of the few shows on my short list that I do not miss, you shouldn’t miss. They’ve given Clio free airtime here, but they deserve it. Alright, for our next segment, we wanted to go into our toolboxes and pull out our favorite tools. We get questions about tools all the time. There’s always news tools coming out. And so we’re going to hit this from a couple of different perspectives. So first, Conrad, you’re a DIY lawyer, you don’t have an agency, you don’t have marketing people. What are some must have DIY marketing tools?

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to give you the obvious one and it’s free and not enough people use it. They get so excited about all these tools you can buy. You need to run Google searches and see what’s happening, see what’s out there, see what your competition looks like, see where they’re located in the city, and understand what you’re up against. And this is from an SEO perspective, but who’s advertising? Who’s on the LSAs? What are their review? All this stuff. This is a ton of really easy market research that you can do really, really quickly. So to me, just using Google search and doing a ton of research with Google Search, absolutely a vital tool to use. And it’s our starting point. It should be everyone’s starting point.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I’ll add to that in the research realm with Meta’s Ad Library. So a lot of people don’t know this, but you can go into Meta’s ad Library and type in one of your competitors’ names and it will show you all of the ads that they’re running. So once you’ve done some searches and maybe you don’t know whether their lawyers are in your area, I would add also add Google Maps to this research. It’s free to use Google Maps, see where the other firms are located. I think a lot of times people don’t realize, but the distance matters a lot. And where your physical office and where your competitors’ physical offices are, it matters a lot. So if you’re a D Iyer getting a lay of the digital landscape, these are some free tools that can help you do that. You have other DIY tools

Conrad Saam:

On the DIY thing. I think my next most important tool that I would have, and they’re a sponsor, but they’re a sponsor for a reason because we’ve loved them for a long time, and I believe we do not have any clients. I will refuse to work with a client who doesn’t use this, but it’s CallRail dynamic call tracking. If you don’t have that, you are really at a loss to understand how people are contacting. And there is so much that you can get out of CallRail. The other part of this, and again, this is going to sound like a CallRail pitch, and well, it’s not a pitch, but this is a reason why insist people use it. The cost scales to the size of your firm. So you’re not in for a mass if you’re a DIY or a small firm, you’re not spending a huge amount to get some really, really insightful data. And that to me is one of the small or large, you really can’t run without CallRail.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m going to go with two hardware pieces. You have hardware you have, well, we didn’t say it had to be. It’s a tool. It’s a tool. No, I like it. Marketing tool toolbox, hardware in your toolbox. I’m going with a camera and a microphone. And again, it doesn’t have to be an expense. Maybe it’s your iPhone, but if you are not creating content, video content, audio content and getting that in front of an audience, to me that’s like 1 0 1. Got to have it.

Conrad Saam:

Especially if you’re a DIYer, right? This is one of those things that you can put time in and actually generate effective marketing. I would say that yes, the iPhone as an amazing camera works. I think if you do want to invest in hardware, grabbing a mic, grabbing a Bluetooth mic, grabbing something that is going to up the quality of the audio, that’s money. I think very, very well spent.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What mic are you using there? Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

I have no idea. This is a brought to you by Legal Talk Network. Mike. I put on the red nose on it because I thought it was funny, but I put it in the show notes. What this is,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Mine’s an MV seven. Oh, there it is. We got assistance for our production crew. There

Conrad Saam:

We go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s an SM 58 Conrad and I’ve got an MV seven and I’m very happy with

Conrad Saam:

It. They are awesome. If you’re going to run stuff off of your iPhone, having a wireless hookup is a really, really good idea. And if you’re going to interview people, having a double wireless hookup, so you can each have a lavalier wirelessly connected to your iPhone so you can record. Well, great audio. I think that’s another good move and we’ll have Adam put a link to that into show notes as well.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, our next segment of our audience is, I’m going to call them noses enough to be dangerous. So they’re past DIY. Maybe they like to dabble in the SEO stuff. Maybe they’re still doing some DIY stuff, but they’re a little more advanced. Maybe they’re coming to Local U in Detroit and maybe they’re doing their own local SEO stuff. What kind of tools do these folks need? Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

If you were doing your own local SEO stuff, you must be using a tool like Local Falcon. There’s another competitor that came out. I don’t even know what it is because we’ve just used Local Falcon from the get go. But Local Falcon helps you understand how you rank from a local perspective based on the distance from the searcher or from your office essentially. And so that is a really, really important tool. Without that, it’s very difficult to understand the reach of your local marketing efforts. So to me, local Falcon is a absolute must.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So we use Local Falcon, we also use Bright Local, and one of the things that we like about Bright Local in particular is that it also has a local finder. In addition to the pack, it’ll show you where you’re in the finder. So when you click through the local pack and there’s additional businesses, and that’s really good for leading indicators, are you moving in the right direction? Moving up the finder. And I’m also going to give it a shout to White Spark’s local rank tracking tool. Really, really good. And again, different tools, different functions and features, different price points. And finally, places Scout. Places Scout, I say, is probably a little bit more on the advanced end, but all of these are great local SEO tools, which again, if you’re in local SERPs and you’re kind of in between doing it yourself or working with an agency, you got to have these. Also really important for, as I mentioned, holding people accountable, like actually moving in the right direction. What else you got? Conrad.

Conrad Saam:

So I think at this point, the intermediate level, you need to start thinking about intake management software and serum. And at the intermediate beginner level, one of my favorite products is Clio Grow. It’s a really good product for law firms in kind of that intermediate phase. If you want to get into intake management software, that is a great place to start. There are some others. There are a lot of others that you can also look at, but Clear Row was originally called Lexicata, and it was designed and built to be fairly easy to use. We also work with Lawmatics, right? They are a sponsor of the Legal Marketing podcast Launch, our legal marketing podcast. So I’ll make a point here. If you intend to grow, now is a good time to buy more than you need because changing databases is an absolute nightmare. So if you intend to be a growth oriented firm, now is the time to pick up a lead docket before you need it kind of thing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I’m going to go at intermediate level, I’m going to say, you need a Link Index tool. You need a Ahrefs, or you need SEMrush, or you need MI just think if you really want to play Ball and you’re past DIY and you want to start playing digital marketing ball, you got to have one of those. If you’re looking for something that is more holistic across different channels, I probably go with Ush. Although I love hres, I think that Somer is a little bit more comprehensive in what they’re delivering, but I don’t see how you can start to move in from DIY to intermediate without understanding some more tracking competitive analysis links. Of course. That’s just my take. Alright, final segment. Well, because almost out of time you’re advanced, maybe you’re a marketing director at a law firm or you’re a SEO lead at a bigger law firm. What’s your must haves or what are you looking for when you’re auditing other agencies?

Conrad Saam:

Screaming Frog. Easy Screaming Frog. If you are not playing with Screaming Frog,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A Screaming Frog could probably go in all three of those buckets.

Conrad Saam:

I think that a beginner DIY would drown in Screaming Frog.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, fair. But basic

Conrad Saam:

Site Crawl. It’s technical

Gyi Tsakalakis:

For basic sight crawl stuff. Yeah. Okay, fair. The last two buckets, intermediate to advance.

Conrad Saam:

If you’re not running Screaming Frog, you’re not really an SEO. I hate to be that boom, but come on

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There. It is affordable too. Screaming Frog.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. If you have less than 500 pages, which we just already talked about, having an overweight website, if you have 500 pages or fewer, it is technically correct to say fewer than less instead of less, because that is a accountable number screaming Frog’s free. So go grab that and learn it. The Screaming Frog is one of those things that you can spend a lot of time learning a lot about your own website, and there’s plenty of tutorials on how to use it, but if you want to get nerdy with your own site, that’s the full body scan.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. And I’m going to ask you this question since we are really out of time now. If you had to just have one, what would you take

Conrad Saam:

If I had to have one tool? CallRail.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Wow.

Conrad Saam:

Because I’ll add this because it can record inbounds and you guys are blowing. We’ve talked about intake all the time. It enables you to do that. So I can not only see there’s automation involved in CallRail. There is reporting and channel effectiveness of your channels that it’s in CallRail, and there’s the monitoring and management of your intake, which is where the football gets fumbled all the time.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m taking camera and Mike.

Conrad Saam:

Camera and Mike. All right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No camera, no mic. You can mark it.

Conrad Saam:

Alright,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There you go. Couple tools. So, alright, well, because the housekeeping crew is coming in to Usher Conrad out of his room, we have to say thank you so much for listening to this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Please do give us feedback, leave a review, subscribe. Check us out on YouTube and hashtag lhlm. Until then, farewell Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Speaker 3:

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