Lawyer Website Roasted

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, did you make it home? Okay,

Conrad Saam:

Made it back home. I am still a little bit Scotch addled and I have had way too much music. I feel like I’ve been in a nightclub for 48 hours straight. But it was a great time. It was a great time in Atlanta. Chris put on a great show. I thought the speakers were outstanding. It was great to see you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It was great to see you, great to hang. Congrats to Michael and the Crisp team for putting on a tremendous Game Changer Summit. What else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

So we’re going to skip the news. We got a lot to talk about. We’re going to go deep into a website tear down of Paul Robinson, our new favorite lawyer out of Raleigh who asked for some feedback. And boy oh boy, have we delivered. Hit it.

Announcer:

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

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So as Conrad mentioned, we are super grateful for Paul Robinson volunteering to have us do a tear down of his website and we wanted to go even deeper than that and really look at the entire journey from having someone find the website and then what they find there. And so that’s what we’re going to dive into today. And again, the purpose of this is not to bash Paul’s website. It’s not to bash the law profession, it’s to help everybody get better and to see the blind spots that you might not even know that you have. And so with that, let’s dive right in here. So this is a Google search result for Paul Robinson Law Raleigh. And I think it’s important to start here before we get into the tear down or the, I’ve been calling an audit. I think it’s a more constructive or a diagnostic is really what, this is the type of thing

Conrad Saam:

That’s gentler.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, that’s the type of thing that you and I do all the time, right? Yeah. I mean this is what we do. We take a look and say, Hey look, how can we assist you and improve your web presence? And so the point here is to show folks that number one, so this would be what people would call a brand search query. Okay? So Paul, and you see his website is ranking. We’re going to dive into his website. You can see his Google Business profile one box there on the right. He’s got highlight his reviews, he’s open 24 hours. Those are things that we like to see. What else do you see? Conrad.

Conrad Saam:

There’s a lot on here that I think is interesting. Number one, his Google business profile isn’t claimed. So see down there where it says Own this business, this is not being managed and that’s concern.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s interesting though. I see that and I make that call too. And then you see some products have been filled out on this profile and it looks like some posts have been entered. So at some point maybe this was claimed and then unclaimed.

Conrad Saam:

So this is one of these things that you and I find all the time, something doesn’t make sense. That is true. Finding out the what happened in the past and why fools errand. What I know right now is this profile is not claimed, which is really problematic,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Has responded to some q and a here. That’s good. We’d like to see that engagement. It’s QA,

Conrad Saam:

Why has this been opened up? So I don’t know what’s going on here, but that’s something that I would immediately change. Number two, and I think the interesting thing with Paul Robinson specifically, I think there are thousands and thousands and thousands of Paul Robinson law firms in the United States, and lots of you fall into this category and from our earlier episode, one of the things that we talked about is Paul is not in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has an office in Raleigh, North Carolina, but his real office is in Clayton. Okay? Paul is a two lawyer firm in this Raleigh office. He has 38 Google reviews and what you’ll notice on the title tag of his homepage, which is a really important page, he doesn’t mention Raleigh, he doesn’t mention Clayton, he mentions North Carolina. So he’s trying to win the top personal injury lawyer in North Carolina. That’s going to be tough.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean he does have it in his meta description, it’s in the meta

Conrad Saam:

It’s coming out here, but from a

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Pure, yeah, I hear

Conrad Saam:

You. And the reason I say there are thousands of Paul Robinsons out there. I’ve seen this pattern repeated over and over again. We’re a smaller firm, we’re outside of the major city. We’re going to compete in the big city. And I don’t know this because we haven’t looked at the analytics, we haven’t looked at the data, but this came out in our first round of the Paul Robinson review. I don’t think he’s winning in Raleigh. He’s not winning in local search. I don’t think he’s winning as the top personal jewelry in North Carolina. I don’t think that’s winnable for Paul Robinson. And so for me, the geographic focus on this is in an area, it’s either in Raleigh, right? And I know your query was for Raleigh, which might be why Raleigh is showing up here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It is. I can tell you that as I was doing the research for this, yes, this exact problem happened. There are lots of different Paul Robinson laws.

Announcer:

Sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Paul Robinson attorney as a brand search populates all sorts of different things. And in fact, where I am in Michigan, there’s Paul Robinson law firms, and so that’s why I

Conrad Saam:

Modify that was okay, which is fair. My point being strategically, why are you playing in Raleigh? It’s a bigger population. There’s better people, blah, blah, blah. You’re not going to win the local game and you’re not going to win the search game.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m going to qualify with this. I’m going to qualify with this. As you mentioned, two person firm. Again, I don’t want it presumptuous. I would say that if you’re going to play in Raleigh, you’re going to need to make much more significant investment to compete in Raleigh than what

Conrad Saam:

You’re, and why do you say that? Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I mean the first step is the reviews. If you’re going to be in local search in Raleigh, you better find a way to really get after those reviews, whether that’s going through, maybe you have an existing client list that you can try to get some people to leave a review. Maybe you’ve got some other ways to generate more reviews. But even if you show up organically for non-brand queries in Raleigh in your ranking, these other firms have hundreds of reviews. You’ve got 38. Not to mention that all the other stuff that’s going to go into actually showing up backlinks content, all that stuff.

Conrad Saam:

So Gyi, you’re right. Open up a backlinks profile. Let’s grab a trust for example. And when you run ah HS, you’ll see that, and I know you hate the domain rank number, but this one makes it so obvious that this is not going to work in Raleigh. They’re at a 0.9. When I ran Ah S for Paul Robinson law,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do you have linking root domain count?

Conrad Saam:

I don’t have this because I’m looking at a static image right now. I did a little pre-research on my own here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, fair. Okay, but that’s a good point that this is one of the things that we look at is how competitive this is. What I look at is how competitive you are you on linking root domains versus the competitors who are actually ranking both in the local PAC as well as traditional organic.

Conrad Saam:

And this is just a foundational asset with 38 reviews and essentially zero domain rank. You’re not going to play in Raleigh.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s going to be tough.

Conrad Saam:

A lot of your content is focused on a place that you can’t win. You’re just not going to win. For me, and I’ve seen this pattern over and over and over again, this looks to me like the site is, the intention of the site is for vetting Paul. It’s not generating new incremental business. By and large. If you run SEMrush, you’ll find that the vast majority of the terms for which this site ranks are branded terms, which is fine, but recognize that this is not driving incremental business from local search in Raleigh. It may be working in Clayton and it probably is now. Is it a ton? No, but can they win in Clayton? Yeah, so play where you can win baby.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yep. 32 referring domains in a H ref. So again, competitors are having hundreds if not thousands of the top competitors. A couple other quick points from me. One is that they do get the categorization, so they’ve got the most specific category. They’re not using UTM parameters to track

Website clicks from Google business profile. So that’s one thing that I would check. And we’re going to click through to the site and we’re going to talk about this in the context of the attribution as part of the phone call in a later episode. I see a phone number in a meta description over here that matches the phone number over here going to as we click through, I’ll verify this, but oh six five, my hunch is that that’s the real number. There’s no tracking number in the Google business profile. So you’re not getting any data from your direct calls from Google Business Profile. Curious your thoughts on this Conrad in light of the validation on user click through and behavior. We’ve been saying don’t use phone numbers in meta descriptions because you’d rather command the click than have somebody call from a meta description without the click.

Conrad Saam:

I have no empirical evidence to show either way. My knee jerk is if they want to call you, it’s not like they’re not going to call you because they weren’t able to find the phone number outside of your meta description.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and it’s showing up in your Google business profile. It’s in the one box, right? It is

Conrad Saam:

My point. It’s right there. So if they want to call you, it’s not like that is obfuscated. It was actually interesting that you pulled this up when we played the role play on what to ask your agency. One of the things that we talked about, and this is really important, so key and I have just shit on this profile, so let’s call that up for what it is. We’ve just given you a bunch of theory. What we have not validated is whether or not we reality and theory are aligned. It’s possible that this profile is doing great. It’s possible that you’re generating a bunch of inbound calls from this Google Business profile number. It’s possible,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But we’ll never know because you’re not tracking it.

Conrad Saam:

But we’ll never know because you’re not tracking it. And so if you go back to that original episode, what we said was this is what we think, but don’t do anything until you validated that what the theory says and what the practice are align. And so I think

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s rely on your own data.

Conrad Saam:

Rely on the data. Sometimes Gyi, sometimes I see stuff and I’m like, that should not work or that should work and I don’t know why. And if it’s working, leave it alone. Don’t touch it, don’t rock the boat. And if it’s not working and you can’t figure it out, that’s where you start. But don’t rely on people like us talking at conferences to make ourselves sound smart without looking at your own data. That is such an important step that we miss so frequently and it drives me nuts. So we’re going to go deep on the website further after a break. Gyi, we’re back looking at Paul Robinson’s website.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I’m just going to click through from the Google business profile just to demonstrate that we wouldn’t know the difference between whether someone clicked here or clicked here. But in Google Analytics and Search console, this should fire a organic visit. And so here we are at the website and first thing I noticed that, oh yes, there is a different phone number in the primary call to action. I’m very curious about what’s going on with the call tracking, but it does seem that there’s some call tracking and we could look at source code. We’re not going to do that now because of the benefit of viewers, but we would look at the source code to see if it was doing a dynamic number insertion or a swap. Again, for me, ideally you’re using something like CallRail to do dynamic number insertion so that you can track phone calls at the session level back to their source. So there’s some call tracking going on. That’s good. What else do you see Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Well, one of my favorite tools, we’ve talked about this before, is the site colon search. And that will give you a list of index pages that Google knows about. And when you do that, what you’ll find is they’re using the practice area plus micro geo strategy for this. And again, I’m going back to my theory perspective that I don’t know that a single page on an otherwise weak website is going to rank outside of where your office is because you’ve put up a page that says personal injury lawyer, garner personal injury lawyer, Wilson personal injury lawyer, Wendell personal injury lawyer, nighting Dale, personal injury. I don’t know that that is going to work. I suspect that it is not, but this is a strategy that has worked, but I think this requires a much stronger backlink profile and really, really well-written content on each of these pages. Neither of those is the case. So again, I’m giving you theory. I would want to validate the theory, whether or not this is actually generating any traffic. SEMrush tells me it’s not for any of these queries, but that’s what I would want to look at. How’s it ranking and is there any traffic at all?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And on the spot check just to validate that he’s not showing up anyway. So there are firms that are employing this strategy, but it’s not Paul’s.

Conrad Saam:

So this is a great example of where the same tactic will not work the same way for every firm. And again, I hate the SEOs who try and make themselves look smart by suggesting you can do this because I did that same thing for this client and it worked for them and you just have to plug and play. It’s different, it’s foundationally different

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And they’re just running a playbook. There’s no actual critical analysis of anything, just this is what we do.

Conrad Saam:

And so at the worst level it’s like this worked once. I’m just going to deploy it everywhere. And so you have to be thinking about this. So I suspect that their whole content strategy for Paul Robinson is not working and someone probably heard that this was a good idea at a conference.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A couple other observations from a conversion standpoint, they do have some primary call to actions. They got free case evaluation by the phone number. I’m not in love with the way that the phone number is being rendered up there, but it is a clickable button. So if we’re doing that’s a mobile, I’m sure that that’s a mobile click to call. It’s got a form. So you’re giving people multiple options. It’s also got live chat which will expand. The other positive thing is that at least in this experience, the live chat is not doing a annoying interstitial. It’s on asking for it or on click. So pops open the chat interface. It’s not blocking out everything. You’ve also got the widget down here. So from a conversion standpoint, you’re giving visitors options to contact you. You’re communicating that there’s a free case evaluation. You are calling out some of the major personal injury law firm and making it clear that you handle personal injuries and listing some of the types. So I would say that a lot of the 30,000 foot high notes on conversion are being hit here.

Conrad Saam:

I like that. I think that’s very, very fair. So this is, again, you can see Paul, this is Paul with the Raleigh skyline in the background. I think it’s just another example of where you’re playing in a league that it’s going to be difficult to win. I’d rather see you own where you are, which is Clayton. Oh, scroll down again there. Yeah, so we’ve got Carrie Clayton and across good gravy, right? Those are big markets.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think the other thing that I’d be critical on the imagery, I mean I like that he’s using a picture of himself. I think that’s good. I get that you want to do some kind of geographic tie in, but I’d like to see a little bit more, something a little more authentically. Paul,

Conrad Saam:

If

Gyi Tsakalakis:

He’s got an interest or some kind of affinity, I’d bake that into the imagery as opposed to just the generic city. And certainly I don’t love standing in front of law books.

Conrad Saam:

No, we’ve made fun of that a lot.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, we could do a much deeper dive. This is cursory diagnostic auditing. I haven’t spent the time to read all of the details of the copy. My hunch is there’s some things that you can improve on there, but he is talking about answering phone calls, returning emails so you aren’t left wondering about the status of your case. I think that’s a good thing. I’d like to know a little bit more about putting the client at the center of this. I’d like to see more if you’ve got clients that they’re singing your praises or maybe you have a video testimonial of a client that’s talking about how much you’ve helped them. This feels a lot about Paul and not so much about Paul’s clients.

Conrad Saam:

Interestingly, I did find a page in Spanish, it’s only one page, but this could serve as a landing page. It’s fully multilingual. It hasn’t left things with an English nav and a Spanish content. So I did find that, which I thought was fascinating. The other thing, Gyi, that I did, which I think everyone should do on the regular because you’ll always find something stupid. Although in this case I didn’t run this through screaming frog baby, find some 4 0 4 errors or validate that everything is showing up 200. And when we did that, it was clean. So the 4 0 4 is that’s, that’s probably one of your favorite things to do. It’s one of my favorite things when I’m talking to a new client. They’re like, Hey, by the way Murphy, I just noticed that this page of your bio is returning a 4 0 4 broken error. So that’s something that I always like to check in on as well.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

For sure. Redirect, Janes missing. H ones missing titles. I don’t know if you’ve got more from the Screaming Frog report, but from a technical standpoint, screaming Frog is amazing to identify some of those really low hanging fruit things that we see all the time. The firm logo is the H one on the page. Those are just,

Conrad Saam:

That’s a common one,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Yeah, it is.

Conrad Saam:

I think we did that recently with something so a clean bill of health through there. I think that’s important.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It is. Another thing, just going down this page, I don’t love the generic practice area imagery. For me, every time that we see stock, I’m trying to achieve the site objective in a different way than with stock imagery. I understand there’s budget constraints and having custom design versus a more templatized design and all that stuff comes into play. So again, I’m not trying to be critical here. I’m just trying to make an observation of something that I might work on improving is finding ways to depict your practice areas that aren’t including this stock imagery.

Conrad Saam:

You want to give an example?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Personally, I don’t think that you need all of these different practice areas laid out like this. In my opinion, you can accomplish that through a navigation. You’re already doing it up here, right? You’ve said it a couple times what you do because again, I think of the Matt Homan haiku of what you do. And so you need to be concise, clearly. You want to communicate how you help and why you’re uniquely qualified to help. And again, I don’t see a lot of the uniquely qualified to help part. I see the what you do, which is important, but okay, they get it. You help people that have been injured in an accident. I don’t know that we need all this. I mean most of the time, you know what this is for? This is SEO stuff, right? They’re trying to pick up on those practice area page traffic things. And I’m like, you don’t really need to do that. And I know that’s a very common practice and like I said, budgetary constraints. But this to me is a place to be having client testimonials, maybe a client video, some of these things that you’re going start to communicate the why do people hire Paul? What does Paul do that’s unique? How does Paul help clients that other firms can’t? How can we start to do more positioning for our firm versus you got a car accident section, motorcycle accident section like every other lawyer has on their

Conrad Saam:

Website? Lemme ask you one other thing that I noticed that’s just a little silly. Why is there home in the primary navigation?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because the template came with home. I hear what you’re saying because you can make, so what Conrad is saying is that you can have global home navigation with the logo usability wise. Yeah, I hear you. It’s certainly, at least in this rendering, it’s making the

Conrad Saam:

Contact. That’s my point, right? It’s turning your primary N into two layers, which

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Now

Conrad Saam:

It looks like you don’t want that looks home contact and it’s exacerbated by at the top. I think it’s exacerbated by the size of the width of the logo. Sorry, really the aspect ratio of the logo as well as the free case evaluation, right? Agree. Both of those things are exacerbating the primary net. Now we’re getting to minor usability knits. But

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, no, I think again, this is just auditing and observational and it’s just good stuff to know. And also, I don’t even know what the aspect ratio is of this share. So maybe I didn’t even check to see if it was responsive, but my hunch is that it probably is. So anyway, we’re coming down here. Why do I need a personal injury lawyer? Again, this just strikes me as it’s not helping to position Paul, not helping Paul stand out. I do like seeing some FAQ right now. We can talk about how these are in accordions versus other ways to render the FAQs. And I didn’t check on a markup on this, although I believe currently Google has deprecated FAQ in the results, but they go back and forth on that. So I think there’s some things to think about with the FAQs, but the FAQs, this is the first time that we’re really talking about the client. Like what should I do after an accident? How do I know if I have a claim? We’re starting to put ourselves in, these are some of the questions that the potential client might have and I think it’s good to be answering those.

Conrad Saam:

Hey Gyi, when we come back, we are going to show the audience what I believe to be the first ever blog post ever published here on Paul Robinson’s website. Stick around after the break and we’ll show it to you. Alright, this review comes from Howard 3 83 from Apple Podcasts, roads, great info and fun. Listen, I can’t recommend this podcast enough for lawyers looking to understand how to market their law firm. Every episode is packed with a ton of good information and they present it in a fun and entertaining way, especially today. Guys, I haven’t found a single episode I haven’t enjoyed. Thank you so much. Howard. If you love us as much as Howard, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast. Leave us a comment, Spotify, YouTube hit us up on LinkedIn. We would love to hear from you. I can tell you that the last three things that we have recorded have all been based around a question from a lawyer, and those tend to be our best episodes. So hit us up and we’ll work to delight Dazzle and otherwise make your day. I just in the chat sent you a link. Why don’t you click on that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.

Conrad Saam:

Always dangerous when done live,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very dangerous. This is done. Please open this photo out of nowhere

Conrad Saam:

And here you go. Gyi, what I believe to be the world’s first blog post, what you can see here is an empty page allegedly penned or typed into WordPress in 1970. This is a problem

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Been around longer than two years.

Conrad Saam:

These are the little types of pages that you want to try and find and kill.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Did you check to see if this was indexed? This is a,

Conrad Saam:

It is indexed.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s index. Yeah, that’s how I found it. Yeah, so this is a just technical hygiene type of thing that you want somebody to be on top of that and that certainly shouldn’t be indexed. So okay, we got testimonials. This is great. I’d move these up higher on the page. I think we’ve already scrolled down here. I think this needs to be a little bit more primary. And then we’ve got some videos. Again, this kind of stock footage stuff, not in love with it. It’s probably a better ways to do it. But good note here. We got Paul on video answering questions. Now again, I don’t know if I would do it in front of law books, but I love this because it’s going to humanize Paul. He’s going to get a sense of it. This to me too is a place for you to do the why. Practice law, introduce yourself. Hey, I’m Paul. This is why I do this. This is who I help, how I help them, and why I believe that I’m uniquely qualified to help. He’s doing some FAQs answering in here. I think that’s a positive

Conrad Saam:

Thing. So let me knit on this because you are correct. Let me make a couple of suggestions on how to make this better.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great.

Conrad Saam:

One of the things that I don’t like about the logo on the website is that we already talked about it’s kind of wide. It is short and fat and it’s actually made worse because if put a tagline underneath it, it tagline doesn’t show up here, but that’s a very fuzzy use of the logo, right? I would love to see the logo as a visual logo and no words, Paul Robinson law, just get rid of that, have the consistency of that logo and I’m looking at my own screen and I’m telling you to do what I do. So take that for what it is. Get rid of the books in the background, throw you logo in the background and just keep that logo in front of people. A simple visual logo in front of people over time. I would love to see that. And the problem with the books is you end up with a background that has multiple colors and you end up needing to put this black on white text. It goes on top of the background. It just starts to look goofy. If you just use a very plain wall with your logo on it, you solve that problem. It’s a small thing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, no, that’s some good design feedback. Alright, news and blog.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What do you think about news and blog there, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Well, from a pure content strategy perspective, I suspect that this blog is doing nothing. And I suspect the reason that there are 10 pages of blog content, 10 pages, I don’t mean 10 pages of lists of blog content. I mean 10 pages of blog content, one of which was that error that we found earlier. I don’t think this stuff is doing anything. I think this was published because someone said

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We need blog posts.

Conrad Saam:

You need blog posts. Because if Google likes blog posts and someone heard that and said, okay, well we can do blog posts,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, tell the good people what you would do to assess whether or not this was doing anything.

Conrad Saam:

I would look for one of two things and ideally both. Number one, I would look, see if there was any traffic to any of these blog pages. And I am fairly certain there is not. And ideally if there is traffic, I would validate whether or not people that came in on that page are in North Carolina for starters.

And they probably are not. But if I’m wrong and I’m happy to be wrong on these things, I would really want to know did people who came in on that page from North Carolina call the firm and all of that data you can discover, but I’m pretty sure that nothing is happening for these pages. So I’d look for traffic. If you cannot find traffic, maybe it was a brilliant article about the weather in Raleigh, North Carolina. How do weather conditions affect car accident claims? Maybe it was a brilliant article and it was cited by Duke University and they linked out to that. I don’t care if no one has looked at this page in 27 years since that first blog post was not published. I would keep that link. I would keep that page up and I would keep that link. So those are the two things I’m looking for.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Those are great. So traffic you mentioned, if it’s any converting traffic, and I would add in there, not necessarily just to potential client, but maybe if you’re using content as a subscription vehicle to get someone to sign up to get long-term drip, that’s fine. Links, I’m totally with you. The other thing that was implicit in your traffic thing, but I think for folks that might not be obvious, check to see if it’s indexed. You’re not going to get any traffic from Google is not indexed. Now this one is indexed, so that’s positive. But how many times do we come to blog pages that Google’s not even indexing, don’t even want to keep that stuff in the index that’s totally wasted. You’re never going to get traffic, you’re never going to get conversion. And even if you had a link to that page, it’s probably not doing much for you.

Conrad Saam:

Totally agree.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

As we keep coming down here, we got hours of operation he have, I thought he had map in bed somewhere. So this is part of the theme template. I’d probably maybe think about putting these a little higher up because again, you’ve got the map embeds are great because they contain so much great rich information including reviews, address, yada, yada, yada. And then maybe you don’t need so much of this stuff kind of being hypercritical here. I don’t love the layout of all this

Conrad Saam:

Or having a fax machine.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, well lawyers still fax each other. So that,

Conrad Saam:

Can you scroll down again because I think you just exposed something that I really like. This is the next step. Here’s a review count for each of his offices, Clayton, North Carolina. Now, if I remember correctly, Clayton is southeast of downtown Raleigh, if I remember correctly. My point being, I want to see a local Falcon scan of Clayton, what’s his opportunity here? This is where I see opportunity for Paul. What is the opportunity here and how can we build this out? This is where there’s a chance that this website is generating incremental business for Paul and it’s probably the only place, the only channel that would work for him.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yep, absolutely. I think those are good points. The other thing that I would check here is a structured data markup just to see if they’ve got that in place. But I think that might be visually too disruptive for our purposes here. I see some social links. We’re not going to assess social on this, but I’d be curious to see how many people are actually clicking on a Facebook and Instagram link on the homepage to go through. I’m not so sure, but again, that’s kind of one of those things where best practice includes your social links on your homepage. Just something that, just an observation. Yep. So you got service area lists, all the different cities. You’ve got the legal services here. Did you notice anything in Screaming Frog about site architecture? Are these, is it pretty flat site?

Conrad Saam:

Go ahead. It’s so small it doesn’t. No difference. It doesn’t really register.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, let’s just click into the car accident page. So this is kind of interesting here. You’ve got the car accident and you’ve got the sub durum. So this looks like it’s like, oh, and that notice that that’s not a subdirectory. So this is being the structure here. Conrad’s probably right? It doesn’t matter that much because it’s a small site, but this is legal services car accident. This is car accident practice area page. And then Durham car accident attorney, which is a sub in the menu, does not actually a sub of the car accident page. And so this is classic SEO type of thing here. They’re trying to pick up on this Durham car accident. And let’s go back to Conrad’s point. If you do a search for Durham car accident attorney, not to mention one, you’ve got ads two, you’ve got local pac, never going to rank there,

Conrad Saam:

Don’t play.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And then now down here, what do we got? So the best firm that’s trying to take advantage of this strategy is ranking below the local pack and Paul’s not anywhere to be found on the first page for that. And so again, is that really the most effective use of that strategy? I don’t think so Visually here. I think there’s all sorts of problems with text and contrast the overlay. Also, we got scales of justice and suits. So again, I would try to get rid of this stock content

Conrad Saam:

And hammers. We got all sorts. You got three things going on there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s definitely

Conrad Saam:

A law firm. If you can’t figure it out,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This page should probably not exist at all. Is the answer to that one. Anything else? We’ve kind of gone deep. We’re 40 minutes in here. We’re 40 minutes. Anything that jumped out jumped out at you

Conrad Saam:

Aggressively refreshing local Falcon to get my skin, a personal injury lawyer in Clayton, North Carolina to come up because I would like to end on a positive note and I told you so in that I would like to show that this is going to work.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Quick question while we’re waiting for that scan. So we’ve been very constructively critical on a lot of fronts here.

Conrad Saam:

So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We said all this long tail optimizing pages for cities. So what would you do instead? Where would you deploy resources in a different way on the website? Or would you not deploy them on the website at all? Where would you start talking ads or something like that? So you’re talking to Paul and you’re like, look, this is what you’re currently doing, this is what I’m currently seeing. Aside from just cleanup stuff, how would you reprioritize and recalibrate on marketing objectives here?

Conrad Saam:

So I think what I would do, and I’m going to make the assumption that the EMR data on this is accurate. This is a vetting site. This is not a new business site. People are right. It is a

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Brochure.

Conrad Saam:

It is a brochure for someone who has already learned about Paul and that needs to be the priority of the site, which sadly means there’s not incremental business being generated from this. So I would really focus on making sure that when people come to this and having car accident lawyer Kingsford and car accident lawyer, Smithwick or whatever the different cities are in North Carolina is not helping at all in that objective. I want this so much about Paul and then I want to win Clayton. I don’t want to do anything until I’m winning. Clayton. He’s got a good review profile for a, it’s not even, I don’t even what you call after tertiary. There you go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

He’s already winning. He’s already winning. Clayton,

Conrad Saam:

This is my point. So I want to know what we can build from Clayton and bluntly. I would give up on Raleigh and I would find the next Hamlet, the next Clayton town crossroads that I can win in and build an incremental business from there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And here’s another thing just too, just to kind of reiterate your point so we don’t know for sure, but if he’s not playing in local services ads, I would check out the economics of local services ads, especially for Clayton. He looks like he’s winning in the local pack. And then to your point also, if he optimizes his homepage, he’s likely going to show up as the number one spot he for Clayton related searches, right?

Conrad Saam:

Yep. Alright, check this out. This is a fascinating local Falcon scan. I don’t know if you can pull it up.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I can. There it is.

Conrad Saam:

All right. Look at that beauty.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yep. Talk to the people. Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

This is absolutely reinforcing the theory that GI and I have been talking about. Give up on Raleigh. Dude, you’re never going to win it. How can we expand Clayton? How can we go northeast and southwest? What is the town down here? I think it’s a Smithfield on the southeastern side outside of Clayton. And this is why I like these more concentrated local Falcon scans. You lose once you go outside of Wilson Mills. Well, okay, there’s 95 crosses, 70, there’s your next office. Now I want to know who’s there, what their review profile is, what the population looks like. But right off the bat, and this is Centipede strategy in action, that’s where I’m looking to win po Hotan right below that, what’s there? What is that? You’re not winning there. You’re not going to win there with your current office. So can you win in that space by taking those 38 reviews in Raleigh and thunking them right there? Move your office. That’s my read.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Love it.

Conrad Saam:

Because there’s incremental business to be won there. That’s what we’re talking about.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. And I think, again, for me as we’re wrapping this up, it just comes down to reprioritizing resources, right? The objective here shouldn’t be like, let’s go spend a ton of money to compete in Raleigh when we can spend more efficient time and money, whether it’s opening up another close office, investing in local services ads. And again, if you want to go compete in Raleigh, we didn’t talk about timeline, but if you’re like, look, I want to be in Raleigh Raleigh’s like the audience, then start talking to ads, you better start talking to ads. You better start talking other channels because just investing more, if your sole resource deployment is I’m going to go hire an SEO company to get me to try to rank and Raleigh, you’re going to spend a lot of money. And I still think you’re going to struggle because you don’t have the volume of reviews.

Conrad Saam:

And I’ll tell you this, we did the pretend interviewing a digital marketing agency. If you are Paul and you tell an agency that you want to move into Raleigh and they don’t raise these issues, that is a terrible vendor, that is a terrible vendor and it’s a great way to find a good one, tell them something stupid and that you have a big budget and see if they push back.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So again, we are so grateful that Paul volunteered this and next time we’re going to take it a step further and actually give Paul’s firm a ring so that we can get a sense of how if Paul’s handling intake, because there’s probably some opportunity for improvement there. Thanks again everybody for dropping in on this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you just landed here, please do click that subscribe button and we’d love to hear from you. We’d love feedback, show topics, questions. Of course, we’d love a positive review from you if you’re willing to do that. Otherwise, for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Gyi and Conrad saying farewell,

Announcer:

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Conrad Saam:

I was trying to shut him up, but he kept going.

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