Show Me the Clients! — Holding Your Marketing Accountable

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Gyi Tsakalakis from AttorneySync. And I am at a tech show.

Conrad Saam:

And I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, and I am on the other end of the country in Las Vegas at Mass torts Made Perfect.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I should have mentioned that I was in Chicago today on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We are going to talk about what we’re talking about at our relative conferences and talking about the spirits of recording remotely from conferences. The internet is always a challenge, and Conrad and I were talking about the interesting duality of sponsoring the wifi at a conference. Conrad, what do you think about the wifi sponsorship?

Conrad Saam:

I think the wifi sponsorship is generally sold to someone who has never used wifi at a conference because you invariably end up with swearing and cursing and lost data, and it is a pain in the ass. Although if you do that password, I know the password here, it’s about a funding company, so it gets in your mind. But boy, oh boy, if it goes down, everyone hates you, not the conference organizer.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I hear that and that is classic conference issue sponsoring the wifi, but you really do talk about it. I mean, you want to be top of mind. All publicity is good publicity sponsor the wifi, which unfortunately we cannot be using because it did not work. So thank goodness for 5G.

Conrad Saam:

Yes, thank you Smokeball, for providing us with this opportunity to banter about wifi and sponsorship. It seems like almost everything these days is sponsored at these conferences. It’s kind of out of control.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and since you gave Smokeball a knock for sponsoring the wifi, I will give them a positive. They threw an outstanding party last night. I think that’s one thing too about just the conferences in general is get out there and meet the people, right? You come to these things, a lot of this content, you can get it online if you’re in person, go to the parties and side events, even though a lot of ’em are sponsored. I think that that’s one of the most valuable ways to build your own community and get involved in the show communities. But enough about that for now. What else do we got today, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

We are starting, as always with the news. There’s a lot of conversation about ai, which is not a surprise, and we’re going to get a little bit political in the news with Trump going after the legal system. And next we’re going to get into the meat of the podcast. We’re going to talk about what we’re talking about at our respective conference sessions,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Talking about what we’re talking about. That is meta.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, let’s sit down and think about that for a while.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lockwood, pretend to music

Announcer:

And 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:

Welcome to Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing. Let’s start as always with the news. All right, Gyi, lots of stuff. We’ve had a paucity of news in the past, recent episodes, and now we are going to have a long news section. Paucity. There you go. There’s your SAT word for the Day, brought to you by Smokeball. Alright, what’s going on with Google Business Profiles?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So Google Business profiles that people have been tracking, we talked about this before, but it was just in a test and we’re seeing it more widely rolled out. They’re switching from the q and a section to a AI ask about this business interface. And so instead of being like we’ve talked about how you can populate the q and ass on your GP profile, talk about features and benefits and service offerings, positioning and all that kind of stuff, well that’s all going away it looks like. And now they’re going to be using Gemini so that users can actually ask like, Hey, is this a good lawyer? Or how long has this lawyer been practicing? They’re obviously going to ask other questions than that, but just to give people a sense of that, if you’re not seeing this yet, you can test it on Google Maps, search for lawyers in Kentucky and click into their Google Business profiles. It appears that for sure it’s been rolled out in Kentucky. I haven’t seen it in a lot of our clients haven’t switched to it yet in major markets. So I think it’s going to be one of these slow roles, but I do suspect that we’re going to see more of that.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, while we’re talking about Google and ai, Google launched their AI mode. Talk to me about that. Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, so it’s only experimental similar to what they did with the SGE. It’s only in labs, so you’ve got to opt into it as an experiment, but I would encourage folks to go opt in and try the experiment. It is very GPTE. It feels like Google response to chat GPT, but you’re going to see this switch from search to conversational. Google doesn’t exactly have it figured out yet. There’s still a one trick pony with ads, but I think if you want to take a peek at where this is all headed for Google, go take a look at what they’re doing with their Google AI mode.

Conrad Saam:

And just to complete the Google trifecta of news, Google Notebook around the web, what’s going on with this? Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So if you haven’t used the Notebook tool, it used to be that you would feed the Notebook tool, the example that we use. You can upload a podcast and it’ll do that summary of the podcast. There’s a bunch of other applications you can use with Notebook, but now they’re allowing you to access information from around the web so you can apply notebook to all sorts of internet information. It makes Notebook a much more robust tool. So I would go experiment with that too. And I think in the marketing context, again, you’re going to see people as they start to use Notebook for a variety of different ways, one of those ways might to do research about their life legal issue. And if they’re doing that in notebook, seeing where Notebook pulls information from is going to be useful for you of trying to be a part of that consideration set. As users are going through their journey of doing life legal research, looking for lawyers, comparing contrasting lawyers, again, the fundamental shift that’s changing it is the way that we access these technologies with AI embedded in them.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, Gyi, let’s switch from Mountain View to Washington dc We have kind of kind of not touched on politics on this pod. I know every time I flirt with it, I can feel you just wishing I would shut up, but there’s a lot of conversation I understand at a tech show. There was a lot of conversation down here in Vegas about Trump really going after the profession. So the American Immigration Lawyers Association has been specifically named in an executive order. Trump has had two white shoes. Skadden Arps and Paul Weiss have completely cravenly capitulated to the demands of the White House Perkins Cooey standing strong. There’s been a lot of fallout on this. I’m happy to see. There was a lady from Skadden who resigned. I hope some more people resigned from Skadden. I hope they lose business because of this. There are students who are refusing to go to recruiting events at Skadden specifically, and our good friend and old longstanding friend of the pod, one of the first people I ever met in the industry. Carolyn Elefant on behalf of solos put together an amicus brief. The deadline for that is April 9th. You’ll be hearing this after that deadline, which is unfortunate, but a lot going on, a lot of conversation about politics and the legal profession. I mean, you are the philosopher major with a jd. What do you think? And a full on constitutionalist, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, let’s look at it this way. We’re a show about marketing law firms, but in the essence of marketing law firms, you have to have the rule of law

Conrad Saam:

And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You have to have a judiciary. And so ranking in Google is going to be meaningless if there’s no law. And so I’m a member of the State Bar of Michigan. I was very proud the State Bar of Michigan put out their messaging on the rule of law. The A BA has put out several messages in support of the rule of law. We have to stand up for this stuff as lawyers, this is our existence, right? And we know the anecdotes, we’ve heard the stories. You kill all the lawyers first. This is serious stuff. And I think that it behooves all of our obligation to stand up for the rule of law, especially as lawyers. So if you’re listening to this and rolling your eyes because you think that we’re politicizing this, honestly, shame on you because if we can’t be aligned on the rule of law, none of this stuff matters. End of rant, dropping the mic.

Conrad Saam:

Honestly, that might be the best thing I have heard you say on this pod ever. I love that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Shame and let that be a reflection of how serious, again, I don’t get into this stuff, but when the state bars around the country are reminding people that we are a country of laws, it’s like, wake up folks.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, let’s hope the next taping of Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing is not from El Salvador. Okay, moving on to something a little bit more fun. Jessica Hawkins from ConsultWebs sent us an outstanding note on the best legal podcast of 2025. And the cool thing is she actually researched it and listened to podcasts and it’s not just put together by garbage ai. And I also happen to know that she recently received a promotion. So thank you Jessica.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thank you Jessica. I appreciated that she actually did the work to actually, because as we’ve joked in the past, some of these lists are AI generated for lack of a better way of saying it. And I’ll also say this though, and I’m not going to say that Jessica was thinking like this, but think about how strategic it might’ve been to get some visibility for consult webs on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing by reviewing podcasts, right? And I bet you some of those other podcasts will also reference that list. So for lawyers, if you’re connecting those dots there, being involved in local community podcasting and local sports, podcasting and politics, podcasting, listening to those shows and talking about them is also a way for you to get visibility and awareness for your own brand on the shows themselves.

Conrad Saam:

And finally, and this is not a news item, but I am desperately seeking to add an amazing customer success person to my team. I’m pretty sure that this is the first time we’ve been soliciting employment on Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing, GI above this. I know that, but we’re looking for great. Amazing. Hey,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Congratulations. You’re hiring. I love it. Why don’t you, for folks that have no, where can they go and look for this job description and stuff. Is that on the website?

Conrad Saam:

It’s on the website, yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

On the website.

Conrad Saam:

Lemme put this differently. If you can’t find it on the internet, we don’t want to talk to you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Or shame on you because you’re trying to market this position and it’s hard to find what internet marketer,

Conrad Saam:

This is what we should do. I should hide it somewhere carefully on the web and you have to be clever enough to figure out where that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is. Is I’ll where you should put it, put it in your GBP on

Conrad Saam:

The second page of Google.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, put it in your GBP post. That’s the only place people got to search Mockingbird Marketing, click through. You got to

Conrad Saam:

Increase that idea. Oh, look at that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Wow. Wow. Yes. Click manipulation brought to you by Lunch Hour Legal

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Marketing.

Conrad Saam:

That’s not market

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Click manipulation. That is totally, that’s just you’re trying to put your job posting out there. Where else would you put it?

Conrad Saam:

Let’s take a break

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back. And as we’ve mentioned, we are reporting from the conferences we’re attending. Conrad, what conference are you at?

Conrad Saam:

So I’m at Vegas, mass Torts made perfect. There is all sorts of crazy money going around. I’m not really a Vegas person, I don’t really fit the vibe here, but it is a perfect setting for Mass Torts, made perfect, lots of speakers. Terry Bradshaw was here. They had Miranda Lambert yesterday who I learned as a country singer. Apparently that’s how out of touch I am

Gyi Tsakalakis:

With pop culture knowledge.

Conrad Saam:

With pop culture I to, I thought it was a talk about Miranda rights or something. I don’t know.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Did you get a picture with any of

Conrad Saam:

These? I wouldn’t know Miranda Lambert or Terry Bradshaw. If they were in the car with me, I wouldn’t know. But there was lots of photographing. There was people lining up for photographs and it’s as Vegas as you can possibly get. Paris Hilton was here last year and there’s massive lines to get pictures with Paris Hilton. So anyway,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Give the people what they want,

Conrad Saam:

Give the people what they want, which is apparently Miranda Lambert and Paris Hilton and Terry Bradshaw

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And

Conrad Saam:

Conrad Som Barkley and won Conrad Psalm for a small donation to the master trust made perfect foundation, which helps people not kick puppies. I got

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And how much do you have to pay to get a picture with Conrad Psalm?

Conrad Saam:

Oh, you know what? I don’t know. We should

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Work on that. You’re giving away for free. I can tell you’re undervaluing your

Conrad Saam:

Likeness. I will tell you this, having searched Miranda Lambert and Shaquan Barkley and Paris Hilton, the only one that looks worse than me is Terry Bradshaw. So I don’t,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I can take a Sequan Barkley, but I’m not

Conrad Saam:

Se All right. Yeah. See, look, I had to look that one up too. Sorry we’ve let this go for far too long. The question you were going to ask me is, what are you talking about here?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re right, you read my mind.

Conrad Saam:

We started Mockingbird back in 2013, and we’ve been doing data from day one and collecting data from day one. And what I basically did is I’ve grabbed 18 slides, 18 graphs that showcase how what we think is going to happen and what vendors want us to believe is happening are actually not really true. And so they were just kind of 18 separate concepts. The one that I found really fascinating, and you mentioned that there may be a Google issue with this as well, but targeting, so we looked at a meta targeting campaign that was targeting this specific example. There were four counties in New Jersey that you could define in meta and just target people in those four counties. When we actually looked at the latlong and plotted the latlong of the people who had actually looked at the ad, who received the advertisement, we found that 29.7% of those people were outside of those four counties, and most of them were outside actually New Jersey. So that’s one of those examples we used L two, which is a data accumulator to actually this analysis.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So this is super interesting to me, lots of

Sub points here. Walk us through how this data analysis worked, because you’re saying, I want to make sure I’ve got this right for listeners benefit. Yep. You’re saying you looked at, we were advertising on meta in these specific counties and we got what you found. You had contact records of people that didn’t live in the counties or because they have been in the county with their phone, and then when they filled out their information or they became a client or lead, they were used their home address. Talk to me about that connection of how did you discern that meta got it wrong,

Conrad Saam:

The long, that’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What you saying, right? You’re saying meta got it wrong, right? Okay.

Conrad Saam:

Yep. The lat long of the locations of the people who received those ads, we were able to get back. And then L two plotted both of that on a map.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There’s the last this long at the time they responded to the ad.

Conrad Saam:

It’s not a response to the ad that they saw the ad.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay,

Conrad Saam:

So Google thinks that this person lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, but they’re actually in North Dakota, and that’s a 30% error rate, which if you’re spending tons of money with bad geotargeting and you’re trying to do geotargeting, that’s super, super problematic.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, this is a great point because it’s like, well, what’s your action? We’ll takeaway here, I mean, you’re not saying not to buy on meta. You’re not saying not to buy media on Google, or are you saying that

Conrad Saam:

If you have a large targeted spend, and not necessarily pay per click, but I’m talking about programmatic display, if you have a large targeted spend, relying directly on the publishers for their own targeting is somewhat of a, it’s not a fool’s errand, but it is certainly not extremely accurate. And there are services through which you can go to make sure that your targeting is a lot more accurate. You can still advertise on Facebook, but go through a service that will actually make sure that they run the targeting for you instead of relying on that end publisher. Because what happens is, A, you’re wasting 30% of that budget, but it’s also driving up the cost of everything else everywhere as well. And so it’s a self-reinforcing thing where the worst the targeting is, the broader the targeting is, and we’ve seen this with keywords as well. We’ve seen this with brand versus non-brand, the worst. The targeting is systemically, the more the publisher makes because they’re able to serve more clicks that otherwise wouldn’t have received a dollar.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This makes me think of two things that are in the same theme, but different contexts. One is click fraud. So if you’re not using something to filter, click fraud, click sense, or you can go look for click fraud filtering. It’s the same problem. It’s like what you think you are buying, you’re not really buying. And so I’m totally with you on holding the platforms accountable, whether it’s with technology, third party providers. I think also, especially if you have the budget, if you’ve got the sustainable budget where you’ve got dedicated account reps, go hammer your rep. Go talk to your rep and be like, look, what are you doing here? Get some credits. And we do this all the time where it’s like, you got to give us some money back because you spend our money poorly to the platform I’m talking about. The other one that I think about though is, and this is harder for programmatic and if you’re doing brand awareness or those kind of campaigns, but this is why for direct response, you have to be focused on cost per qualified lead because again, there’s going to be waste no matter what you do.

You’re going to add the additional filtering. Maybe that gets you down from 30% waste to 10% waste. You can add the click fraud filtering. Maybe that gets you another 5%. I’m just making numbers up here. You decrease the waste and you should do those things. But at the end of the day, the only relevant question is is that media buy with all that, all those costs involved, the waste, the actual media spend, the additional expense of the technology you’re using to filter it, is that still generating qualified consultations and cases for you? Everything else is irrelevant. And so all those things will improve it. They should ideally, if you’re actually better targeting, getting rid of some of that click fraud waste, those things should help you improve your cost per client and cost per qualified consultation.

Conrad Saam:

One of the other slides that we threw out there is a very common misperception with pay-per-click budgets, and it is the exact inverse of what you just described. People are trying to buy more clicks within a given budget and they’re looking at that as being successful. And if you take five seconds to think about how stupid that is, you’ll realize that anyone who is driving,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s take five seconds to think how stupid it

Conrad Saam:

Is. Okay, let me explain. If you’re taking five seconds and you haven’t caught up with Conrad’s concept of why this is stupid, let me explain. Well, let’s use an extreme mesothelioma lawyer is very expensive. If I’m bidding on mesothelioma lawyer for, I’m going to, let’s call it $200. I can buy a lot more clicks for the word law for $2 a click or $5,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The Detroit Lions, what it

Conrad Saam:

Might be, or the Detroit Lions. You can do lots of things to get more clicks there. You’re not going to get more consultations there. Are they available?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, this is going to seem like the self-serving part of all this stuff.

Conrad Saam:

This is very,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, this is why, I mean, you’re a doit yourself lawyer who’s going to go thinks like I am listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, these guys are talking, they’re trying to help me understand which channels are working and blah, blah. I got some infrastructure stuff. But the average do yourself lawyer, they’re not doing all this stuff. They’re opening an account up, they’re adding their credit card and they’re buying. And it’s just like, and you’ve said this before and I’ll say this, I think I’ve even kind of pushed back because I’ve tried to be the fair arbiter of like, look, if you can go do this stuff yourself, but you think about it in this context, no, you can’t. No one’s filtering out click fraud. Not these do yourself lawyers are holding platforms accountable for bad media targeting.

Conrad Saam:

That’s right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There’s eating the waste and then they’re like, this is super expensive. Turn off the account, this stuff doesn’t work.

Conrad Saam:

And Google has made this worse by deliberately pushing you towards volume of click.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s not just Google.

Conrad Saam:

Well, you’re right, you’re right. But you were talking about back in the day, I would encourage a solo to go and say, you could learn how to do this effectively as a solo. If you’d spent a little bit of time to understand the difference between broad and phrase match and you’d had a little modicum understanding of negative keywords

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Could be really conservative. You get your just very tight matching. You might do volume, but you could do it,

Conrad Saam:

You could do it and it was fine and you can’t anymore. So the example that we used here, this was a campaign that we over five quarters we picked up from another agency. They were doing, this is one of the graphs I shared, 4,300 clicks a quarter to generate 54 leads, right? With the same budget we only bought, let me see, 844 clicks. So we’ve increased the amount we were paying per click, decreased the overall volume, but the number of leads went from 54 to 134, and that took a lot of time. But the volume and these up into the right things, it is not necessarily driving your business. And that drives me up the wall.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And that’s the second. And again, self-serving. It’s not trying to be self-righteous and all this kind of stuff, but this is self, well, my talk is on holding your marketing accountable. It’s not just a function of do it yourself, right? If your in-house people are managing this and they don’t know what they’re doing. If your agency is managing this and they don’t know what they’re doing, that’s why we sound like broken records on this. Cost per qualified consultation stuff, connecting your business metrics, new clients and open case files. It’s because of all this stuff. I mean, this is why we get so fired up about this stuff is because just the other week, someone sent me some other agency’s reporting, it’s all the same thing. It’s up until the right, we’re slapping high fives and I’m like, show me the clients. And they’re like, well, we don’t really look at it like that. We don’t connect that far. We do conversion pixel fires. We can show you ranking reports, we can show you traffic, we can show you awareness, we can show you impressions, we can show you reach, but if you’re not connecting it back to this, you’re missing all this stuff. And there’s just so much waste in there. Anyway, end of ran.

Conrad Saam:

So grab a slide out of your jack. What else were you talking about? Give me another

Gyi Tsakalakis:

One. Well, by the way, I think another, let’s do an Easter egg in here. If you want our decks, go to lunch, our legal marketing’s LinkedIn page and send us a message through Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing LinkedIn page, and we’ll send you our decks. How about that?

Conrad Saam:

There you go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

See who’s paying attention. No one wants the decks anyway, so no one’s going to do it. So this goes into my other talk, which is on this concept of legal SEO beyond keywords and links. Look, that’s the title. It’s supposed to be catchy. You got to get to the conference attendee debate there. I’m not saying that keywords and links are dead. I’m not saying that local SEO is dead. I’m certainly not just saying SEO is dead, but understanding how users are using these technologies, whether it’s Google with aios, whether it’s, if Google switches to full-time AI mode, whether it’s chat, GPT, perplexity, notebook, LLM, whatever it is, if you are stuck in the mindset of keyword rankings, build links, direct response, and you’re not thinking about the impact on how user behavior is changing, how it’s not just a search click call. I mean for some people it is, but for a lot of people it’s changing.

It’s prompt refinement, it’s query refinement. It’s a IO showing up with zero click, but your brand showing up and back to this point, it makes it that much more important that you’re holding this marketing stuff accountable for actual client generation. We’re already starting to see it. A lot of SEOs are reporting traffic’s down. They’re blaming it on zero click, they’re blaming it on aios, they’re blaming it on a bunch of other things. But if you’re just taking it to traffic, if you’re a law firm and you’re just looking at top line traffic, your instinct is going to be traffic’s down, fire my marketing people and go chase the next marketing person who says they can raise their traffic up. But you are going to be in a doom loop of this because there are macro changes going on to both the way users are using the technologies and how the platforms are impacting. They’re training us to use the technologies in a different way. If you’re not on that stuff, you’re going to be very confused about what the heck’s going on when all of a sudden your Google business profile now is buried beneath and also is embedded with its own AI stuff. Or you’re like, I’m suing it with Q and as like you told me. And all of a sudden now it’s like, whoa, people are just interacting with your business through the Gemini interface on your GVP profile.

Conrad Saam:

When we come back, we’re going to talk about traffic and clients and how that relationship is often inverse.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back. And I wanted to pick up, Conrad, you were saying something before the break about this connection between traffic and clients. I want you to elaborate on that because I think this is really important.

Conrad Saam:

Well, we’ve beat this horse in the past and we’ll continue to do so, but I think one of those KPIs that you’ve heard Gyis saying is a terrible KPI is traffic. And I think in many cases you’re told, you’re convinced that the more traffic you get, the better you’re doing at SEO, which is, it might be true sometimes, but it is rarely, always true. And Gyi, there’s a concept that just getting traffic in and of itself is all you need to start ranking for the hard things.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is that still a thing out there? Is that going out? Are you hearing that at your conference?

Conrad Saam:

I am hearing that at conferences from SEO experts. Every conference I go to, some SEO expert will tell you that, and I think that is very, very

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Problematic. You go to conferences with real SEO experts.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I mean, you can be an SEO expert if you’re willing to write a check,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Right. Thank you. Thank

Conrad Saam:

You. That’s why I’m an SEO expert, Gyi, because I’ve got a checkbook.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Exactly

Conrad Saam:

Right. So let me give two examples, two kind of extreme examples of this, both of which were in my deck that we talked about. But we had a client for whom we did a pretty dramatic page count reduction. They had a lot of what was bluntly garbage content. And you guys know this because we’ve talked, the SEO world has talked about the importance of quality content, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And yet you’re still barfing out useless stuff. And so anyway, we showed this example where over a period of about a year, we dropped the page count on a site by about 34%. And what happened is their traffic actually went down, but their conversion rate on that traffic improved by 15 x. So the numbers look like this. Nine leads, when we started, nine leads a quarter from search when we started a hundred leads in the final quarter after we had had done that reduction in page count. So we reduced the content, we reduced the traffic, but the firm was doing that much better because their content strategy was so garbage.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And you’re talking organic leads, so we’re talking just SEO channel, you’re saying

Conrad Saam:

Just SEO channel.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And so what do you tell your clients why that’s happening? Why do you think that’s happening?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I mean, we’ll use concrete examples because it’s so obvious when you think about this. Lemme give you a very common blog post. Smith and Jones would like to congratulate Mary Murphy for winning super lawyers in 2018. And it’s a three sentence blog post about Mary Murphy winning super lawyers five years ago. So it’s a garbage piece of content. No one is looking for it, right? No one is looking for Mary Murphy in 2019, and it overall deprecates the value of what is actually on the site. And so we talk about content and penalties for content, having a site-wide impact. So if you have a bunch of stuff that no one’s looking for that are on these thin garbage pages, and it got really stupid. There are people who have put recipes up on their blog. We’re so desperate to come up with ideas for blog content. You and I, we’ve used the example of the Brooklyn Pizza, Brooklyn style pizza in New York and this firm that was getting thousands and thousands of page views for Brooklyn style pizza when they were a construction law firm. It just doesn’t do anything, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So your point is, is that if you get rid of these 2019 super lawyer pages, Google recalls your site, those pages are gone. It’s viewing your site in a different way that’s causing you to appear to have more search visibility, qualified, relevant search visibility that’s generating more leads, right? You’re saying removing the content, Google changes its view and you rank for stuff maybe better or stuff that you weren’t ranking for before. Is that the idea?

Conrad Saam:

100%. And I have been doing this since 2010 or 11 when we first started. I mean, I don’t want to say I came up with a concept, but we got really deep on consolidation of content. So when I was at avo, and this is kind of a funny thing, I use this anecdote all the time. It’s so clear. We had this q and a thing. Wherever you could ask a question, lawyers would answer the question. And that created content for us. And that was brilliant. And I never thought it would work, but it did. But what happens when you do that is lots of people asking variants of the same question and the most common content. Gyi, I am wondering if you know the punchline. What was the most common content that we had?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Gosh, it’s not coming to me off the top of my head.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, good. That’s good. That’s good. I’ll just say that’s good. And then I’ll tell you what the answer

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is. Who’s the best lawyer? I don’t know.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, no, no. The most common question was a variant of this. I’m 19 and my girlfriend is 17. Can we have sex in Maryland or wherever it might be. Thousands. I was going to say. And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thousands just in Maryland.

Conrad Saam:

Well, just in Maryland, but thousands. Thousands and thousands of pages. I mean

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thousands. I would not guessed that. I wouldn’t have guessed

Conrad Saam:

That. I want to say I would think handle

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lieutenant.

Conrad Saam:

No, no. It was all about can we have sex, right? So anyway, we took all of those pages, and you should have known, we took all of those pages and turned them into a really good single page with really rich, deep content about that specific issue. And I mean, I spent a year of my life doing that with all, I mean, it wasn’t just that question, but all sorts of questions. So I really have seen the harm in having lots and lots of pages that are fundamentally duplicated or thin, et cetera. So we’ve been doing this overall, but Gyi, I will tell you, it’s actually more nefarious because if you as an agency convince your clients that traffic is the key indicator that you’re doing a good job and all of a sudden the traffic starts slowing down or maybe it starts dropping, what are you going to do? Gyi, you want to retain this client and they know what the KPI is. Gyi, what are you going to do?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m going to hook up my WordPress API to chat GPT and pump out as much content as I possibly can.

Conrad Saam:

Well, that’s nice. So you might do that. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m trying to get traffic to go up.

Conrad Saam:

You are a better person than I am, dude. So what you also might do is you might engage with a click farm in say, India, to drive a whole bunch

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Of traffic

Conrad Saam:

To

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A website. There you go. That’s a good one. See, you’re better at this than I am.

Conrad Saam:

No,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I haven’t been in black hat world in a while.

Conrad Saam:

I’ve wallowed in the mud with these pigs for so long, just anyway.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, that was even another context, just in case people are still skeptical about this and you guys, these guys are full of it. Here’s the most obvious one to me.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You show up in the local pack, guess what? I can’t tell you how many times I’m like, phone’s ringing off the hook for our GBP tracking number. And these are firms that they don’t have brand. So it’s not people looking ’em up by name. 80% non-brand, 20% brand. You can see there’s no search console data, zero clicks, tons of phone calls, and you look at qualitative CRM data. How’d you hear about us? It wasn’t from referrals, wasn’t from brand. It’s people that are like, I use Google. They didn’t click, they just called right from the search result. And so that’s never showing up as traffic anywhere.

Conrad Saam:

Right? Oh, I see what you mean. But you’re saying the traffic’s useless because the actual conversion, no traffic may have nothing to do with traffic.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There’s no traffic. Yeah, there’s no drag. Exactly. There’s, what do we call it? The goosh, the traffic. The go has nothing to do with conversion. I mean, that’s a little bit strong, but of course there’s a segment of your overall traffic that’s relevant that converts, and that’s what you should be looking at, right? That’s why, again, broken record, that’s why the atomic particle here is the qualified consultation. Work yourself backwards from the qualified consultation, not from traffic, not trying to go through and filter all this traffic. Forget about all that stuff. Start with your qualified consultations and work backwards going to tell you the story.

Conrad Saam:

It’s almost like, Gyi, next episode, we could do a segment on how to segment your traffic to just qualified quality traffic. Just throw it out there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. There we go. If you need a reason to subscribe or come back next time, we are going to step by step walk you through how to do this.

Conrad Saam:

That was masterful subscription ask. That was podcasting 2 0 1. Brought to you by, Gyi, he’s been doing this longer than I am. He just seamlessly threw in a good reason to subscribe. I left the bait and you told people how to bite it. Well played.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ve been reading all these podcast blogs. Just kidding. I haven’t been doing that. Maybe I should. Anyway, thank you so much for coming and listening and getting through these rants that Conrad and I have. We really appreciate you. If you’re just landing here, dunno what the heck’s going on. Check us out on YouTube and subscribe to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, wherever you like to get your podcast. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi, from MTMP and a BA tech show, signing off Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing.

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Gyi Tsakalakis:

I Can feel it. I’ve see, I can’t see anything I can feel, Adam, I’m out there in the world right now. Just freestyle and rants are going to be long and you can’t reign me in. Fired up, caffeinated.

Conrad Saam:

I’ve got, Adam and I are somewhat telepathic. I could feel him. He was hovering over the keyboard.

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