How Much Marketing Is Enough? – Legal Marketers Explain

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Gyi, happy July 4th. This is one of my favorite celebrations. I typically take my family from the left-leaning Seattle to the left-leaning Massachusetts, and go to a small town parade full of radio flyer carts and little small town parade. What do you do for July 4th? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m usually up at my mother-in-law’s with family and hopefully try to get on the water.

Conrad Saam:

You are a boat guy, aren’t you? I know you have a secret boat problem.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m a water person

Conrad Saam:

A water person.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay. It’s funny, I joke about this. There’s something about, I mean maybe everybody feels this way, but there is something about the water. I was just in Chicago and got a chance to get out on the water. We did our team retreat and we rented a boat and went out on the lake and I just find my most peace and calm being on the water. I love the water.

Conrad Saam:

Maybe we should do an episode from a boat, from Gyi Yacht.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t have a yacht, I’m a renter. Rent the boat or have a friend with the boat.

Conrad Saam:

You were on the water, but not in Lake Michigan, correct?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, in Lake. It was Lake Michigan. In fact, today you might notice I’m actually up in Traverse City and there’s a lake right outside too.

Conrad Saam:

Alright,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, what else we got today?

Conrad Saam:

Alright, we are as always starting by the way, everybody, this is a Google Free podcast. We’re not going to talk about Google at all other than talking about I’m talking about them.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, we are going to, you’re wrong. We are going to,

Conrad Saam:

Oh crap.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But it’s not going to be

Conrad Saam:

Google. This is an SEO O the news question. Yeah. Alright. I was excited to not talk about Google today.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How can you talk marketing without talking about Google? We try not to. And for audience, people who are listening, why we’re hemming and hawing. We don’t want to talk about Google all the time, but let’s face it, people use Google to find lawyers. So despite what many people think,

Conrad Saam:

Alright, after we do the news, we are going to not talk about Google first in our segment. How much marketing do I need to know? However, we’re then going to transition to a Google heavy conversation around how do you market two practice areas from an SEO perspective on the same website?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hit it

Announcer:

Money makes well 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:

All right everyone, welcome to Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing. Let’s hit the news. All right, that newsreel does bring me back to my small town July 4th, radio flyer parade days. I do like that. Alright, happy July 4th, everyone, when it arrives, please find yourself in a small town watching a small parade because it is as America as you can possibly get. Okay? In the news, other than the date of July 4th, Hona, our friends at Hona have done a $9.5 million venture capital raise, and I had a recent conversation with their founder, Matt McClellan, and one of the things I asked him, Gyi, was

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What is Hona? What is hona?

Conrad Saam:

Great, great question. Thank you for redirecting my listeners. Hona does updates for a case. So you guys are probably familiar with case status and our good friends at Hona believe they built a better mousetrap. And I initially heard about Hona through our mastermind group when a couple of my attendees to that mastermind group we’re talking about how great it is. I did ask Matt and now with this interest in this very, very large raise, why they were willing to go in and be number two in a market because case status has really done a great job for a long, long time. And he said, we listened to the complaints that we heard about keeping people informed and they have an app free way to communicate between law firm and client. And I think that is a key differentiator and why a lot of, at least my clients really, really love this tool. Sorry, that sounded like as pitchy as you could possibly get, but you open the door, Gyi, and I’ll walk through it more news. If you do not get enough Gyi and Conrad in your life, we will be speaking at the answering legal summer camps July 24th and August 14th. So if you want to hear more Gyi and Conrad, please join us,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not just GH and Conrad. This is the second time I think I’ve participated, but great content, they have a lot of fun. I really enjoy the answering legal summer jams.

Conrad Saam:

They call it summer, summer camp, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think that’s right.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. But

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I like jam rebranding. Sorry, answering legal.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, sorry. We will put that in the notes. I can tell you some of the content that’s going to be talked about because they asked us to speak on these things. Marketing agency heads explain why your campaigns aren’t working, what to know about search marketing in 2024, how to break through on social media and how to elevate your firm’s content creation, which should be interesting as Gyi. And I often talk about not publishing more content for the sake of publishing more content. So get more of Ghen Con on July 24th and August 14th. And next in the news items we have a, I told you so from, Gyi, Gyi, do you want to read this quote or shall I? And then you can gloat.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You read it, you read it, you set it up. I’m just going to bask in my glory.

Conrad Saam:

Bask in your, I told you. So those of you who’ve listened, I think this was two episodes ago, did a long conversation about, actually we did it two times in a row. We did a review of two elements of local service ads that I personally hate. One was the multiple messaging, so message multiple, which meant that the lead went to multiple law firms and the other was the inclusion of your branded terms in the keyword set for local service ads. And we kind of put your approach into three buckets. You could either do nothing, turn off messaging or opt out of the branded. And the problem being that there was no transparency into the data of what you’re actually bidding on. That’s the end result of the problem. So we have at least one anecdote, I’ll read this to you, this is from me the other day.

For those of you listening to Lunch, Hour, Legal, Marketing listening to me and Gyi talk about turning off brand queries in local service ads because you don’t know how much they cost you and therefore pervert the economics of those campaigns. Gyi has been warning for a while now that doing so might cause you to drop out of LSAs altogether. And I’ve cited examples of clients for whom that hasn’t happened. Well, here’s a counterpoint from a client who turned off the brand campaigns last month. His impression share dropped from a consistent 15% to one impression for the month. And so, Gyi, you can gloat and you talked about watching impression share and I didn’t really think that was all that important, but boy oh boy, was that a metric that was useful to watch? And you were right, man.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, again, this is anecdotes and I’m not gloating here because I, for just as frustrated as everybody else’s about the lack of transparency on this. But look, we talk about this all the time where your economics make sense to align with Google, align them because it’s the same thing with clicks. Google gets paid for clicks. Again, you have to go listen to the prior episodes. Don’t just say you said bid on broad match for everything because you got to just get more clicks, but click through rate matters. The best guess corollary here is that leads per impression, booked leads per impression. That’s when Google gets paid. And so the more you’re doing that, the more you’re improving that impressions to leads rate it holds. To me, that’d be obvious that Google is going to show your ads more because Google is getting paid more times.

They show your ads. And again, to Conrad’s point, I’m sure there are example of counterpoints and all this stuff, and I know there’s a lot of sentiment around, especially around messaging, that these messaging ads are, there’s no intent and people using messaging don’t sign up. You’re totally wrong. I mean, well, I can’t say that maybe it’s right for you, but go look at how fast you’re responding to the messaging before you conclude that everybody uses the messaging is not a client. If you’re not responding like it’s a text message, you’re not 12 seconds from a cold text message. The issue is not just the messaging function of the tool, it’s not the necessarily a function of the intent of the user. It’s because you’re not answering them fast enough. And so I always challenge folks and I’m like, go look, go look at your average response time. If it’s not seconds, it’s not just because people on messaging don’t have cases

Conrad Saam:

And Gyi is specifically speaking to someone who contacted him about this issue. I can tell that there’s a story behind this on the messaging. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There’s been a couple times where people are like, it’s come up or people are like, messaging doesn’t work. That’s like being like, live chat doesn’t work

Conrad Saam:

Or phones don’t work.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, they’re going to say, phones, work phones, you got ’em on the phone. Phones. Best thing since sliced bread. Not everybody wants to be on the phone,

Conrad Saam:

But I want to be crystal clear to our listener, just because GUI and Connor have cited one data point where this is problematic, doesn’t mean that it’s universally that that is a representation. If you are uncritically listening to Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing thinking that we should change our strategy because of this one anecdote, stop yourself right now and find it in your marketing strategy to test and validate what we’ve shown as a single data point against how you are actually performing and be ready to test this over and over again in a very blunt fashion with LSAs because there is no depth of data for you to analyze. And so you have to blunt instrument this month to month.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And lawyers, if you’re the business owner, go to your marketing people and ask them to show you how fast they’re responding to messages. Go ask. They’re not, they’re all going to be crowd.

Conrad Saam:

We don’t know. We respond to everything in real time. We do a great job, great.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Show me, show me. We respond to everything in real time. Let’s take a break. So Conrad, you may remember a conversation we had during Lunch, Hour, Legal, Marketing office hours that we hold on Fridays about a question, how much marketing do I need to know? And I’m going to read the question, can anyone recommend a crash course in SEO slash marketing? I’m currently paying fine law $2,100 per month. I interviewed another company who said, I’m getting virtually no traffic to my website and that they can fix it for about $5,000 per month. I reached out to FindLaw who says my website is performing well. Sorry. So first we’re covering this from an office hours question. So if you’re a Lunch, Hour, Legal, Marketing fan, come to office hours and bring your questions. We’d love to answer these questions. Conrad, let’s expand and give the people some more insight into the answer to this question.

Conrad Saam:

Okay? There are so many layers to this. I nearly rudely interrupted you. I’m currently paying fine law. If you’re currently paying fine law, you need to know more about marketing because that’s just a bad idea.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I was going to take for this episode, this segment. I thought maybe we would zoom out a second, and I think you made a note here, but how much marketing you need to know depends on what role you are in your law firm, right? Are you a solo that’s trying to vet vendors? Are you the lead rainmaker? Are you just want to be a lawyer? Because that should answer the question of how much marketing you need. Know

Conrad Saam:

Fair? Let’s assume that this is the leader of a growing law firm, which is the only reason you should be listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing in the first place, right? Maybe they’re not a growing law firm, but they have ambition to be an aggressively growing law firm.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And are they at a stage where they have the resources to hire a in-house marketing person?

Conrad Saam:

Interesting question. They’re paying $2,100 a month. They don’t have the resources to hire an in-house marketing person. Don’t, I don’t know

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What else know that they’re doing. You don’t know. Yeah, we don’t know that. That just might be Undercapitalized

Conrad Saam:

S

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Agency. Yes. Right. Anyway, so let’s answer it both ways. So if

Conrad Saam:

You, I’m making the assumption they’re saying in SEO marketing, I’m currently paying finelaw $2,100 a month. That feels like the totality of their marketing budget.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So not, I can tell you that this firm, they do a lot of the, they would describe it as referral-based marketing. So they do events, they do a lot of local stuff and that’s what their in-house person did. So I’ll just tell you the answer in this context is there is an in-house marketing person, they don’t know anything about SEO. They don’t know anything about digital. So that’s why back to the top, how much should the lawyer, so if you’re the only person that’s responsible for growth at your law firm, then you probably need to know a bit more because guess what? You’re either doing it yourself or you’re outsourcing it. And so if you’re doing it yourself, you need to know a lot. And if you are outsourcing it, maybe you need to know slightly less, but you need to know at least how to vet your partner. And so that’s why I was going down this path of if you’re looking to hire somebody, you need to know enough to be able to make a good hire. And so anyway, the amount of marketing you need to know is very dependent upon what phase you’re in and what role you’re playing in your firm.

Conrad Saam:

So I would say that you just described two different people. So I’m asking that you know who this is. They currently have a tactical local in-house person doing events.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They have an in-house person who doesn’t know digital very well.

Conrad Saam:

That’s fine by the way. So I want to be clear, this is a digital marketing show. The in-house person who knows

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The local market. No, this is legal marketing

Conrad Saam:

Really. Well, the in-house person who can do events, the in-house person who can grow referral relationships, that person doesn’t need to know four fifths of anything about Google AdWords. They don’t need to know what LS

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A stands stands for. Well, not necessarily because if they’re the person who’s ultimately accountable for

Conrad Saam:

Growth,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They’re the person that needs to know enough about vetting the partner.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, no. So what I’m

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Saying is, or hiring another digital person, the

Conrad Saam:

Local person, the local outreach person,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m just saying there’s only one marketing person. There’s one marketing person at the firm. Okay?

Conrad Saam:

But

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A lot of firms, a lot of firms look like I got one director of marketing. They’re responsible for marketing. Okay.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, I get that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.

Conrad Saam:

If you have one person who is responsible for, I think we need to separate tactical execution from annual planning level strategy and well, not

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Necessarily.

Conrad Saam:

Well, here’s my problem with not separating those out. If you have a local boots on the grounds person, they’re not going to be, you can’t have someone, the unicorn is the person who can do the local stuff and crush it in, pay-per-click and crush it. In SEO, that person is a unicorn. Very rare. Or you’re hiring, Gyi, the doppelganger of Gyi, who’s been doing this for 20 years and wants a side gig doing something like this and you’re dropping 250 grand for that person. I don’t think that’s the right answer. The flip side of that is you are the owner or you are high level in charge of growing the firm. What do you need to know in order to work with vendors and partners? I think those are two very, very different profiles, very different pay scales and very different skill sets. And a

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hundred percent that kind of goes to the root of the question, how much marketing do you need to know? So again, I think it’s pretty easy to separate these things. You either need to know enough to hire somebody or to vet a vendor or you’ve got to become a unicorn. Then you need to be super deep if you’re the one doing this. And so that to me is about it. Or if you are the owner of the firm, but you’re not in the marketing function at all, you use EOS language, then maybe you need to know very little because you’ve got good people around you who know it. You’ve got a director of marketing, you’ve got a CMO, and you’ve got tactical people. But that’s my whole point about this. In this particular example, the answer is for this particular firm was you need to know enough to make a good hire. That’s what the real answer is. And so how much is that? So

Conrad Saam:

We went up and now I want to get down into the weeds of this specific situation, and you said something early on that I want to come back to, but implicit in here is your incumbent saying things are going well and your vendor pitching you, the new vendor pitching you, that’s telling you that everything is a disaster. You said specifically that the vendor, the new vendor was showing them that they’re getting no traffic to the website. And then you said something else. I want to clarify. Why does the new vendor, why does the pitcher think they’re getting no traffic? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because they’re trying to pitch them on SEO services. I mean they’re using,

Conrad Saam:

But how are they evaluating that assessment? Right. Presumably

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They’re using a third party tool like SEMrush.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, that’s what I was trying to lead you to.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do you say SEMrush? You say SEMrush or SE Mush. This is one of those Jiffy Giffy things

Conrad Saam:

I don’t care

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are they’re supposed to be SEMrush.

Conrad Saam:

I say SEMrush, but yeah, these are things that I’m not going to worry about. I say somer, okay, but because we keep saying somer, let me delve into this and the vendor problem with this, so let me be crystal clear on this. SEMrush or SEMrush is a third party tool that tries to evaluate a lot of things on your site from the outside consistently. They estimate traffic massively low and inaccurately. And if you look at

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The, I would say massively inaccurately and even more massively and accurately when you have a small site without

Conrad Saam:

When you have the lower sample size. So this is the key, and this is where I think a level of cynicism needs to come in to play on both sides, the incumbent and the third party. If you have a third party who is citing SEM rush data to tell you that you’re not getting a lot of traffic, one of two things has to be true. Either that firm is so unbelievably unsophisticated that they think that data is accurate or they are deliberately using data that they know to be grossly miscalculated to try and pull the wool over your eyes. And I would never engage with a firm who uses SEMrush data to tell you from the outside how your website traffic is doing. That is disingenuous. You are either stupid or lying,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But Conrad, that’s the only data we have. We don’t have access to analytics. That’s the

Conrad Saam:

Only data we have. So exactly. So this might be what, and by the way, there’s lots of stuff that we can look at from the outside to look at the health of a site from an SEO perspective. And SEM rush is not one of those things because it is at best grossly misleading and inaccurate. And so if you’re standing by that data and it is a house of cards, that is a terrible untrustworthy vendor. I hate to say that. If you want to talk data, go talk from the same data point. Now I’ve got another problem with FindLaw, right? I’ve got another problem with your vendor telling you that everything is hunky dory because every vendor wants to show you up into the right because they think that’s what you want to see. And it’s an easy MBA graph to draw that makes everyone feel like everything is going very, very well. So I don’t necessarily think that the incumbent data, especially if you’re relying on them to report on how you’re performing, I don’t think that’s a good idea either. And you’ve heard GI and I talk, sorry, you got me totally worked up on this. I can’t stand these vendors who, perfect.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. One more thing that I wanted to add, because again, getting back to how much marketer I need to know, maybe this is the goosh. Did we say goosh? The go? The go, we didn the go. We talked about the goose on the show before.

Conrad Saam:

I think so, but I don’t think anyone will know what we’re talking about, but hit the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Goosh. The goosh is that the answer to the question is you need to know enough that you are able to, whoever’s responsible for marketing, accountable for delivering on an objective. And so in this context, the answer is you need to know enough to say, Hey, am I opening cases from organic search? And if you don’t know how to figure out if that’s true or not, then you need to learn more because otherwise you’re going to be susceptible to both of these issues. You’re going to be susceptible to my vendors telling me I’ve got 20 million visits a month and the person trying to win my business telling me I have zero. And it’s just funny because this particular example is such an egregious case of that. But once you can say, I know that I’m opening X number of cases from organic search a month, and this is my goal of trying to open this number of cases from organic search, then to me, visitors becomes less of a thing.

So I’m with you Conrad, that there’s maybe a trust issue because they are misleading you. But ultimately when push comes to shove, it’s about are you able to connect open cases to the channel that you’re paying for in this case SEO, and vice versa. When this is the potential prospect of agency, I’d be like, I don’t really care about this SEM rush stuff. Can you show me how many cases am I going to get from your activities over time? To me, that’s the answer to the question. You have to know enough to be able to hold your marketing people accountable for delivering the business objective.

Conrad Saam:

My tangent on this is you cannot rely on your vendor to tell you how well your vendor is doing. You cannot have them tell you how many customers they’re delivering for you. You need to be in control of knowing where the data is coming from instead of trusting what people like Gien Conrad send you. Because people like Guen Conrad, maybe not us specifically, are incented to pull the wool over your eyes there. We’ve maligned the industry again, check

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And another break. Well, we’d like to take this minute to thank a recent reviewer of Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing Harrison, a Lord writes my favorite legal podcast, nice engaging and entertaining content. I learned something new every episode, and we are so grateful. That’s what we do it for, is to hear that feedback and we regularly beg everybody to leave review. So thank you Harrison Alo, and to anybody else that is enjoying this, please do leave a review on Apple or Spotify and subscribe and comment or review us. I guess you could review us in a comment on YouTube and both of us are pretty active on LinkedIn, so if you’re not connected on LinkedIn and you’re listening to the podcast, feel free to connect. We promise we won’t DM pitch you. At least I won’t know about Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

What we automated on LinkedIn.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You are automated. Great.

Conrad Saam:

Are you being taken advantage of by your marketing? How to triple your cases in three simple steps? We won’t do that either, promise.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, thank you.

Conrad Saam:

And now we have a great question from our friend Ben Glass, who clearly does not show up for our live sessions because we did answer this somewhat in the live session recently. But Ben Glass writes, Hey, we have two pretty distinct practice areas and one website, one practice area is about 66% of revenue and the other is about 33% or so. In terms of web content, including blogs and case results, should the allocation of content be along those same percentages or does that matter to Google? In other words, we don’t necessarily want to overpower what Google thinks of our lesser, lesser meaning smaller here really, I’m ad-libbing here, but I don’t want to use the word lesser. I’m going to say smaller practice area and diminish the practice area that brings more cases. Thanks. And since I can complicate anything, one practice area is statewide, the larger one, while the other allows us to handle cases all over the country. Gyi, as one of my favorite SEOs, what should Mr. Glass think about when he’s trying to answer this question?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m, I’m going to take it outside of SEO for a second because it’s not clear to me where Ben wants to go. He’s saying we’ve got one practice area that’s currently 66% of revenue and the other is 33%. Is that what you want? What share of voice are you commanding for each of those practice areas? Are you trying to change that or are you just saying we’re basically like we’re taking it as a given that is 66 and 33 because all this is, I mean there’s a Google SEO part of this that we’ll get to, but to me it starts with you got an overall resource allocation that you’re going to devote to each of these practice areas that should be dependent upon whether are you trying to grow the 33% past the 66% or are you taking that as status quo and what are the value of these different cases?

So a lot of firms, not saying Ben’s doing this, but a lot of firms, they’ll just say, we’re 75% one thing and 25% and the other thing, and I’m like, is that by design or is that just you stumbled into it, that’s just the status quo that will impact your research. Are you trying to make the 25% or 75%? In fact, the conversation we had in the office hours that you alluded to about this, that was the essential question. That firm was a PI in business and we are going down the rabbit hole of like, well, pi, pi, pi. And he’s like, well, he’s actually, my business practice makes up more of my revenue, but I’d like to grow PI to be a bigger chunk. So that impacts your decision about resource allocation anyway. But in terms of the SEO thing, yeah, anytime you try to cover more, you’re going to have a challenge in terms of Google’s eyes. And the biggest one, this was the same conversation we had in the other context, is in local local you get one primary category, but there’s a lot of other aspects to this and I don’t want to dominate this SEO thing. So Conrad, what do you think about multiple practice areas in SEO?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I want to hit one point that we’ll hit it quickly and move forward, but it’s implicit in the beginning of the question,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re going to say, stop doing blogs.

Conrad Saam:

No, I’m not. I’m going to say keep doing what works. But he asked in the question, we have two distinct practice areas and one website, let me just shoot dead. The idea that you should have two different websites. And the reason for that is also at the risk of harping on blogs, I wouldn’t have multiple blogs for these different things. So the SEO theory suggests that the hardest saying, you’ve heard this from me and Gyi ad nauseum forever. So just kind of rinse and recycle. The hardest thing to do is build up authority for a site. And in these practice areas, I know what Ben does. It’s competitive in legal, everything is competitive. And so when you market two different websites, you are now splitting the hardest thing to do and diluting what you’re doing. There is a reason that the directories don’t have 270 different websites.

They have one, and it is because of the authority and that’s the way to win the game. So throw that idea out the window if that’s what you were thinking about. But when you do start diluting your content, your focus, it becomes difficult. And I’ll use an extreme example of this, but I have seen this over and over again. We have seen hacked websites that have law firm content on it and porn on it. And if you’re a stupid computer, it’s very, very difficult to understand what that site is about. If 80% of the content is hidden to the user, but visible to a computer is porn and 20% of it is legal content, you’re like, what is this? I’m throwing it out. So don’t think that that is not a concern. So it is difficult. The way to overcome this, and this is an SEO answer, the way to overcome this, and we’ve talked about this ad nauseum, is building up your site authority.

And so I would want to, in answering this question, Ben, I would want to look at, and I would have two ongoing filtered segments because you have two very different practice areas. I want to know which of those has the most potential for easy growth. I’m ignoring Gyi’s initial recommendations specifically here, which is where do you want to grow? I’m going to try and answer the question of where is the biggest growth potential with the lowest cost? And so I would segment your traffic out. So there’s one national and there’s one that is local. And so you can add a filter to only look at people who are in a specific state, say Virginia in this example, and looking at content that represents that local practice area. And then I would look at everything else and look at the national traffic that is looking at those pages that have a national practice area.

And those are two distinct components of marketing. And then I would look at the competitive set for those things and the national stuff. It’s really difficult. It can be really difficult because it is 50 times bigger than the average state, but where is the biggest opportunity for growth? And I would put your efforts there and I would look at who’s winning, which of those markets has the biggest opportunity to spend as little, to have the biggest growth for the amount that you put into it? And it’s unlikely that the answer is they’re both the same.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, that’s an interesting way of looking at it. I think the other issue that I have with how this is framed is that there’s an assumption that quantity of anything corresponds to production. So I got 66 and 33%. So 66% of my, if I got a hundred posts, 66 of them should be on this practice area and 33 should be on this practice area. This is not how it works, right? One piece of content can generate a different amount of revenue based on a bunch of different factors. And so that’s the other thing too, where I’m like, and I get the question is, look, we’ve only got so much time in the day. We’re only doing so much to simplify things. We’re only creating so much content a week, how should we think about divvying it up? And there is no linear answer to that, but if you’re going to try, I think the advice you gave is pretty good.

But again, I’m like for the answer to this question to make any kind of sense or to have any kind of framework for it, I think it should be thought of in terms of goals for the practice area from a case standpoint, and then the resource allocation that you think you need to deploy to hit that goal, not as a function of the other practices. So if you have some way to quantify the amount of resource allocation, maybe it’s in hours, I don’t know, I guess you could do pieces of content, but figure out how many hours, money, pieces of content you need to hit the practice area goal and forget about how it relates to as a percentage of current revenue. I wouldn’t connect content quantity to revenue percentages like this. So I guess the short answer is no, I should not. So I am reading the clip here in terms of web content, including blogs and case results, should the allocation of content be along those lines? I would say no.

Conrad Saam:

I agree with that because that is a meaningless correlation between volume of, I mean, Gyi and I have talked about the problem with content and the volume of content. In fact, we can put in the show notes, we did a whole episode on why a lot of people are telling you that you need to post more to never delete content from your website are completely wrong and should never be listened to from an SEO perspective. So I think he and I are on the same page that those two things, there should not be any linearity to that. I think from a pure philosophical perspective, you need to think about the correlation between a site’s ability to rank for multiple things, multiple practice areas. And I’ll use, again, I’m going to use this exam, these two extreme examples. The directories are successful in ranking for all of the practice areas in many cases because they outperform everyone else on authority. And that’s why four to six of the results in the top 10 happen to be directories. And I think it’s weird speaking or oh, I was going to promise to come back to Forbes. I’ll have to whisper in your ear my research on Forbes in a little

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Bit. Oh, can’t wait. Next episode. Maybe office hours topic,

Conrad Saam:

Maybe office hours. Oh, we could do that as a teaser. Show up to office hours and I’ll spill on Forbes. And actually Forbes is a great example of this where they’re able to rank across practice areas because they have the authority to back it up. And that’s why the directories can do it. And on the other flip side of the extreme is you have a site that’s been hacked with a bunch of content that is completely irrelevant to the practice of law. And that’s why it hurts you. That’s why it hurts getting hacked, even if no one actually sees the content. You get crushed in SEO because Google doesn’t know what you’re about and they’re not going to even bother indexing, let alone crawling a lot of your pages because it doesn’t relate to what you do. You can have so much content, they’re not even look at it, right? And so I think you need to think of the answer to that question across the spectrum, but use your own data to guide the answer.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

One more nuance on this go, and I am probably reading more into it just because we know Ben and we know his firm, the local practice people that are searching locally, the content’s going to be a lot less of the factor. It’s going to be local SEO stuff versus nationwide. Those queries are probably not generating map pack results. And so the content strategy anyway, what I was getting at, and again, this is anecdotal, this is not any research, Ben, don’t go do this, don’t listen to me. But my question would be, looking at these practice areas and seeing from an SEO perspective, are most of my cases coming through GBP tracked calls and GBP clicked links versus the nationwide practice? And maybe it’s more long tail research based queries, but it’s not localized anyway. So guess what? That drastically will your resource allocation on content.

Conrad Saam:

That is the best answer. Even thinking about which channels you should play in changes based on these nuances. And you’ve heard GUI and I talk about this, not every firm should use every channel. And this is a great answer to that very, very specific question.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thanks Conrad. And with that high compliment, we must say thank you because we are out of time. If you just stumbled across this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, please do subscribe on your favorite podcast widgets and check us out on YouTube and connect with us on LinkedIn because we love to hear from you. Leave us a review, give us feedback, suggest a show topic, show up for office hours, and subscribe to the Bite newsletter. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi saying Farewell for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

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