Help, My Law Firm Is Stuck! – Should I Expand Practice Areas or Locations?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I’m Conrad Saam, and last night I lied to my wife. I said, we are going to a wedding. So we got dressed up and went to Tony and Tina’s wedding, which is an off-Broadway play about a wedding that goes really, really wrong and you show up and you become members of the cast. But I didn’t tell her she had to figure it out on her own.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s fun. And I’m Gyi Tsakalakis from Attorney Sink and I’m about to head out to sea on a family cruise.

Conrad Saam:

You are a boat guy, aren’t you?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ll tell you, people ask me this all the time. I’m not necessarily a cruise person, but for kids it’s great. I joke about this, but we haven’t gotten sick. We haven’t had bad weather yet. I know there’s a Netflix special on all of this that I haven’t watched yet intentionally, but for the kids, they love it.

Conrad Saam:

Have you ever done cruise injury lawyer work?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, we have actually.

Conrad Saam:

So have we.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But what else besides cruises? Conrad, what do we do on this show?

Conrad Saam:

We talk about legal marketing and technology and Gyi and I pontificate and tell everyone we know exactly what’s happening with ai. So you try and hire our law firms, right? So as always, we’re going to start with the news and we’re going to go deep on one of those new segments and that is Direct Business Search is now being separated out as a reporting segment from Google. And then we’re going to talk about an anonymous question from one of my great lawyer influencer people who wants to know whether or not they should expand practice areas with their firm. And we think maybe the answer is to not niche down. As we always say, Lockwood, let’s go

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:

Hi everybody, as always, welcome to Launch Hour Legal Marketing. Let’s hit the news. And first up in the news, we are glad to bring in the story of the very clever law firm that had a great PR stunt, which is getting them a lot of attention to help evict. Bill Eilish after her acceptance speech talked about the importance of not living on stolen land. So great job from a law firm offering to evict help evict Bill Eilish. You can read more about that in my favorite journalistic venue, the New York posts.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

In other news, a 54-year-old personal injury lawyer from Minnesota just became the oldest US winter Olympian. That’s right. Rich Ruen, a Minnesota personal injury lawyer, has become the oldest US Olympian overall as a curler. He’s on the curling team and he’s also been a leader in the rule of law team. And I’ll quote here, this is from Rich. I am a lawyer, as you know, we have a constitution and it allows us freedom of speech. It protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures and makes us that we have to have probable cause to be pulled over. What’s happening in Minnesota is wrong. There’s no shades of gray. It’s clear. So rich, thank you for reminding your country. Thank you for representing our country in the Olympics and the constitution in the press right, and the constitution, the press and a great example of a lawyer being known for something else and the positive recognition. And you don’t have to be an Olympian necessarily, but we’re constantly telling lawyers, yes, you get it, you’re a lawyer and you fight hard and you have thousands of years of experience and you went to an amazing law school, but be known for something else too, what people actually care about.

Conrad Saam:

And we’ve asked Rich to join us on the podcast and gh, how do we take that up and level that up just a little further.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Rich, since I know you are a loyal Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast listener, we would love for you to join us in Nashville August 11th, 13th to tell your story at lunch, our legal marketing summit.

Conrad Saam:

I think that would be amazing. He’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Probably not listening. We’ll follow up with you if we could pull that out when you’re less

Conrad Saam:

Busy. Absolutely. Yeah, he’s a little busy. The firm said that yes, he would be interested in talking to us on the pod, but for the next three weeks he’s incommunicado enjoying the sites over in Italy,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Enjoying the Olympic Village.

Conrad Saam:

We should go to the Olympic Village to interview him about this next breaking news. This is breaking as of when we recorded this. It won’t be breaking news when you hear this in two weeks, but someone forwarded me a screenshot of the reporting infrastructure from local service ads and I’m super, super excited they did because Google is breaking apart direct business search and everything else, which is a really, really big deal. Gyi, and I did a segment yesterday on office hours live segment where we talked about this and we are going to play part of that segment as a teaser for you guys for our first segment here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if you’re looking for more Conrad and Gyi in office hours, please do join us most Thursdays at 1:00 PM Eastern. Bring your questions. We hold live office hours and love to hear from community members about what’s going on with their practices. And finally, our last news item there is fresh near media research out. There’s a lot of insights you’re going to hear more because we have to decide what’s going to be publicly available versus what’s privately available, but a lot of interesting stuff about branding and lawyer name recognition and what it actually takes to have consumers recognize your brand. So stay tuned for that. Let’s take a break and we’re back. As Conrad mentioned, we recently had a great conversation. We thought it was great about direct business search in local services ads. This was a conversation we had during our weekly office hours. And so we’re going to roll a little bit of that for you now and then we’ll make sure you have a link to the whole conversation if you’re interested in knowing more. And we’d love to hear from you on your experiences with local services ads, especially as it pertains to direct business search. And what percentage of your total LSA spend goes to direct business search versus category search. So here’s the conversation.

Let’s start with some breaking news about LSAs. So this, I was wrong

Conrad Saam:

About this. I was wrong. True story.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh my goodness. I already knew you were wrong before they added this report, by the way. I’ll tell you what I knew. Go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

The news is that Google has just segmented out your direct brand search in local service ads from your non-direct brand search. And that is fantastic news. The reason for that is because of the value. If you monetize, if put a monetary figure on the value of something, the value of someone looking for your brand and then calling you compared to the value of someone looking for what you do and then calling you is very different. And presumably if they’re already looking for you, they’re going to find you. You don’t necessarily have to pay them to do that. Google rolled out direct business search, I want to say around 18 months ago. They did it very quietly and they opted everyone in and that pissed me off. And then they didn’t provide any reporting as to how much of your LSA spend was going towards direct business search versus what I’ll call incremental low funnel opportunities.

And so in pay per click where you can segment out your brand campaigns versus your non-brand campaigns, and Gyi and I have gone on and on and on ad nauseum about the importance of analyzing those differently because they have different objectives and very different economics. You couldn’t do this with LSAs because they were munging all this data together. And so in the worst of all worlds, you end up paying Google a large amount per LSA lead for people who were already looking for you. And we didn’t really have any insight into what those percentages were because they never really told us they are now rolling out and they haven’t even announced this. I just saw it. A client sent me a screenshot and so they’re bringing this apart and I’ve been saying for years now that Google has done nothing but take data away from digital marketing people and now we’re getting some back. So thank you. Mountain View,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, and I’ve not thoroughly researched on this, but the couple anecdotal local service ads accounts that I spot checked for firms that are not doing offline brand building. And so I think this represents the majority of firms out there. The percentage of local service ads charged leads that fall under the direct business category was tiny in my experience. Now that’s obviously going to be different. You look at Morgan and Morgan’s local service ads direct business, I bet you it’s a lot higher. The other thing that you had mentioned that I always think is interesting is this idea, and we talk about it in pay per click too, is it worth bidding on your firm’s name because presumably they’re going to find you anyway. Yeah. So first I would say I think it’s worth testing this because again, the question is is that, well let’s just say that if someone clicks on an ad on your name in local services ads or they become a lead in local services ads, let’s just call it waste, let’s just assume that every time that someone clicks or becomes a lead because of a brand query that it’s complete waste.

I think there’s some arguments that maybe it’s not, but let’s just say that it is the benefit, the call it halo or whatever you want to call it that impacts your incremental non-brand in my experience tends to be worth it. Now again, if you’re Morgan and Morgan, maybe that’s not true and I just got off a call with the near media guys in their latest round of research and obviously it’s proprietary so I’m not going to dive in. But the thing that keeps coming back is that people don’t know law firms. And so if it improves your visibility, whether it’s because they click on a branded ad and it increases your quality score and so you pay less for a non-brand click or it increases your visibility in LSAs for non-brand, you got to look at the economics of that. If the incremental waste cost is not as high as the incremental benefit to your visibility for the non-brand, it tends to still be worth it.

Conrad Saam:

So I think that changes depending on how strong your brand is. And I also hundred think you really have to look at the economics of this. I mean we have multiple firms just in the PPC arena that are spending five figures monthly on brand,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

On brand. Now lemme ask you this though. I ask you this and I know because I’ve seen you present this, I know what you’re going to say.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well maybe you don’t because this has just dawned on me.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is there any chance that some of those brand queries are actually, because Google’s doing a close variant show, so they’re actually, you’re paying for a non-brand click, but the keyword showing brand, because I am thinking of that chart that you show and I’m like, man, that’s nuts.

Conrad Saam:

Well, and that’s just our data and we work really hard to avoid that, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You do everything you can, but here’s what you can’t prevent. You can’t prevent. So you’re a car accident lawyer, you put in every negative of every lawyer out there, but if Google matches a non-brand, click to your brand. So a search on your brand, but it actually is the non-brand is matching to your brand as a click. Won’t that show up in the reporting as a brand click when maybe it’s not. I don’t know. I haven’t thought that whole way through.

Conrad Saam:

Well, no, no. If you do a really good job of segmenting out your campaigns,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So you got all, you’re like we’re only bidding on brand,

Conrad Saam:

You’re

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Ing out everybody else’s name

Conrad Saam:

As much as possible, which we actually go really, really deep on this because I think it is important and the fact that the economics are so bad, even for my clients I’m making, and this is an arrogant thing to say, I’m making the assumption that we do a better job than almost anyone else in minimizing unintended clicks on the brand. I’m not saying that we nail all of it, there’s no fucking way we were able to do that, but I am saying I think we do a better job than almost anybody, and I’m probably wrong about that, but call that up for what it is we’re still looking at in the pay per-click world. And then I want to tie this back to the LSA thing, we’re still looking at over $93 per brand lead phone call form. Yeah, it’s mad. And so the first

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Question I had that’s in pay per-click,

Conrad Saam:

That’s in pay-per-click. So what I wanted to see, Gyi, was how has that matched up to the clicks on LSA direct business search and what are the costs? So it lines up the numbers that we’re seeing. And this is again very, I’ve been looking at this for less than 24 hours and so my dataset is very, very small. But for the firms that I’ve looked at, we’re seeing leads cost per leads on direct brand search of over a hundred dollars. They’ve been typically between a hundred and $115. That is a very, very expensive spend. Now your question is the right one does just showing up, is that worth it from a brand awareness perspective because people really don’t have brand awareness around legal and it’s just showing up worth it. I think you could make the argument that that is the case said that if the objective here is brand awareness and probably not brand affinity, are there better ways that I could spend that a hundred dollars to build brand awareness than just paying for people already looking for me? And I think the answer to that starts to become yes at some level of cost per lead that is north of $100.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think you’re right about that. The question that I’m implying is that if you have direct business search on and it increases your leads per impression and you’re feeding the machine a higher leads per impression number, does Google say, Hey, this firm is taking a higher ratio of the number of times we show the ad to accepted leads. So that only matters if you’re feeding it back through LSA. So if you’re a hundred bucks, I agree with you, I think there’s a better way to spend a hundred bucks somewhere else,

Conrad Saam:

But

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They don’t have the same impact on LSAs. Why not? Why not? Because remember, my thesis is that Google shows you a higher percentage of the time even in non-brand based on the percentage of leads that it gets paid on per impression.

Conrad Saam:

Okay? I think my point is I think your leads per impression number, I think you can drive that up from a brand awareness perspective by spending that brand money elsewhere. Even in LSAs,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hold on. You go and you drive more brand awareness through whatever it is. More people are searching on your name, but you have direct business search turned off on LSAs. The machine is not reading that.

Conrad Saam:

Sorry, is your point. You can drive higher engagement from an algorithmic perspective in LSAs by essentially bidding on your brand because people who are looking for brand are going to convert at a higher rate

Gyi Tsakalakis:

If you compare total impressions. So LSA account wide, you compare impressions to number of leads with brand on that ratio is going to be higher. So it’s going to artificially inflate the leads per impression. And so Google’s going to carry that across to non-brand.

Conrad Saam:

So I guess my point is, by the way, this is an entirely theoretical we can’t up. This is true people, this is office hours, this is, you know what this sounds like, this sounds like a bunch of people standing up in front of a conference that they’ve spent $30,000 to speak at to make themselves look smart. That’s what this sounds like. So let’s be very fucking clear. This is me and Gyi, mental mathematics around how this might work. My counter to what you just said with that caveat, there’s no way that Google doesn’t disambiguate those two

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Things. I think Google wants to get paid. Alright, that’s great fun. If you want to come to a conference where people like us do this kind of thing, come to August 11th through 13th and then obvious we wouldn’t

Conrad Saam:

Will share data on what we pull out of direct business search in local service ads at Montreal Local Marketing summit in Nashville. I don’t know what the hell that data is going to be, but we will share that data. We’ll have some very research backed insights instead of Gyi and Conrad pontificating about how Google works

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And welcome back. And as you know, if you’re a regular listener, we’d love to highlight testimonials we received from listeners. And so we’ve got a great one from CT work injury lawyer, so much room for activities, five stars. I found L-H-L-M a year or so ago on long drives from Connecticut to Cape Cod and it has been a staple ever since. It’s one of only two legal podcasts I never miss. The hosts deliver consistently practical, real world marketing and SEO advice, no fluff and minimal hype if you’re A-D-I-Y-S-E-O lawyer like me or just want to know if your agency is screwing you. The podcast is absolute gold. And that’s from Jim Aspel. Thanks Jim for listening. Thanks for the awesome review and I will leave it up to Conrad to deliver some practical advice.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I like his comment, minimal hype because we do hype some things, right? We do get excited about things, we do stand behind them and I’m happy to hype those things that we’re excited about. But the fact that it’s minimal means hopefully that you guys all view this as genuine, which it really is.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Speaking of genuine

Conrad Saam:

Advice, speaking of genuine advice, we talked earlier about the importance of user questions coming to us. This question didn’t come directly to the pod, it came directly to me over social media. And I want to set the stage, Gyi, and I’d love to get your feedback on this law firm is in what I’ll call a tertiary market. It is

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What’s a tertiary market

Conrad Saam:

That’s great. A primary market would be a Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, large competitive, brutal market, which most bluntly, most of our clients kind of function in. Gyi, a secondary market would be a smaller city. To me, a tertiary market is so small that probably people around, I don’t have numbers to put to this, but so small that people around not in your state might have heard of it, but maybe not, right? It’s just one of those very, very by definition localized markets. And so this law firm is primarily a PI law firm. They are extremely well-known in their market. They do all of the things that we talk about in terms of being involved in the community and having great brand, not just brand awareness but brand affinity. And they’ve capped out, the growth curve has just gone flat. It’s a little stale. And the question specifically in this instance, but I think we can use this generically, is should I grow by adding practice areas instead of going deeper into personal injury or deeper interpersonal injury could also mean I’m expanding my reach further.

Another market 25 miles away kind of thing. That’s the centipede strategy that we’ve seen to be so successful. And so that was the question. He asked me this question in a much less roundabout fashion, but I had to set the table for you guys. The funny thing is, Gyi, I had been thinking about this firm and this question, I already have my answer to this question because it’s been in my head for so long, I never wanted to push it on this lawyer, but I’d like to pose a question to you first. Do you think a good strategy and then we can get into the marketing tactics of why or why not. This would be a good strategy would be to grow through the opposite of niching. You and I talk about the importance of specialization and niching and focus and all. We talk about this all the time. Is this an example of where you should discourage specialization and in fact encourage kind of portfolio theory on practice areas?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a great conversation point. A lot of it depends in here because my initial reaction is why not do both? And I think we should lay out some of the trade-offs, right? It’s always about trade-offs. I’ll just work through some of the things that I think about in terms of trade-offs and then we can see where it goes. So there’s a built-in assumption that you made a premise of the conversation, which is that this firm is already capturing a hundred percent market share in their community for all personal injury. So

Conrad Saam:

Sorry, I would say not a hundred percent, but you get to a point where you can’t, and I don’t know what that mathematical answer is, but you probably can’t get more than 40 or 50% of a market at some point in time you cap out. So sorry if I said time, I didn’t mean that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, you didn’t. I was just So the point being is that there’s still opportunity for growth within personal injury,

Conrad Saam:

Correct? You have not killed all your competitors off,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But that incremental growth maybe very difficult, maybe unachievable, maybe more expensive, all those kinds of things. It depends on the market and all this kind of stuff. The trade-off here though, to do the diversification, the multi-practice area approach, and not to even get into tactical, but just the psychology of it is that are you able to maintain that position as the leading expert on this practice area and add additional practice areas? And so I want to save the tactics here, but it’s funny, I was just on LinkedIn and I saw this firm that I know, and in their headline it says something like Premier DUI lawyer and injury lawyer and the injury lawyer part. When you look at their entire profile looks so on side like, oh, and by the way it’s a side of injury lawyer too.

Conrad Saam:

I think we talked about the brand one 800 DUI away, that’s a brand in Seattle and now they’re one 800 DUI away and personal injury. Lots of people are thumb tacking personal injury on their firms in an attempt to play the game.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And not to mention by the way that adding additional practice areas, there are more issues than just the marketing aspects to it. So hiring lawyers and are you partnering and can you be that positioned expert on that other practice area? But I think when we started this conversation, what I was really thinking is, and you wrote it in the show notes, here is this one law firm all people type of thing where you’re more of a generalist, right? You’re leaning into this idea of I’m a generalist in my community, if you have any legal issue at all, if you think you have a legal issue, I don’t care what it is, come to me. That to me is a strategic difference. And so you’re not really positioning yourself as injury plus criminal defense plus family. You’re positioning yourself as law. We do law

Conrad Saam:

Law in tertiary market, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Exactly

Conrad Saam:

Right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ve seen a lot of examples of that in that community. That’s what makes the most sense. They tend to be communities where there aren’t a lot of other lawyers. There’s not a lot of competition in general. And you’re the go-to. So when a law thing comes up, they’re coming to you. And I think that can make a lot of sense. But I’m always considering trade-offs and considering the centipede strategy and broadening, and again, a lot of depends. It depends on what communities are around you and other major cities might be around you or you in a suburb or you’re in a rural community, all that kind of stuff. I always want to think really hard about losing the positioning. My David C. Baker mind is always on the positioning aspect. And so again, in this context you’re thinking, okay, will more people become my client thinking of me as law for all? Is there a risk of losing PI clients that might’ve come to me before because I’m the personal injury person.

Conrad Saam:

So my question there, I think that’s the right question. It’s the positioning piece. This is my question for you. Are they coming to you because of the positioning or are they coming to you because the positioning and tactically from a SEO historical SEO perspective has focused on bringing you there. SEO has rewarded that specialization, right? But my question is, and I’m giving the answer by my opinion, by asking the question, are people coming to you because they think you are an expert and you’ve demonstrated amazing expertise in the practice of car accident law?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s what you’d need to research. And again, obviously you need to research it outside just the context of SEO and demand capture. But that’s what I’d be thinking about. Are they an 80 demand capture from search clients or are they 80% on I know you from the community and it doesn’t matter what you practice, I’m already coming to you because you’re the lawyer in town. Even if you’re just not a car accident, I’m coming to you because you’re a lawyer and maybe other lawyers or maybe you can refer me or what I would be doing here is I would be testing and I think, again, I don’t know this firm, I don’t know what their budget is. I don’t know anything.

Conrad Saam:

It could be any firm,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But I would be like maybe you would take some of your marketing budget and say, Hey, look, let’s see if we can test an ad campaign or maybe it’s a super hyperlocal offline campaign or maybe we do some consumer research in our area. And that might be as easy as inviting people out to dinner and doing a focus group on your firm. Get some members of the local community come together and be like, when you think of me, what do you think of me about, do you think of me as a car accident lawyer? Do you think of me as the lawyer in town? And so I think that would help inform the decision of whether to double down and expand on PI elsewhere or to broaden across practice areas. But again, see to me, if you’re going to do the, I’m the lawyer for everyone, you’re not really marketing on practice anymore. You’re just marketing on law period. It’s not injury plus criminal defense plus family. It’s law. I’m the lawyer in town.

Conrad Saam:

That’s right. I can’t remember what venue this was. You and I were together and someone asked a similar question to this. We talked about if you’re getting requests for outside your practice area, it indicates that you have done an amazing job of branding and it is a success metric and not an annoyance and you shouldn’t think of it as such. And I think that’s what you want to be thinking about because if you are consistently getting referrals for things outside of your practice area, it just reinforces to me that your positioning is not about being a specialist in family or estate planning or tax or personal injury. Your positioning is about people like you in your local market. And if you can win that, I feel like you can generate that business. I think the positioning is much stronger for, I like this law firm because I like them in my market than I like this law firm because they’ve really demonstrated their amazing expertise in the practice of family law or personal injury law. It’s an easier positioning to stand behind. It’s an easier positioning to prove and it makes it easy to diversify from a practice area perspective.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think that’s right. I always come back to the question of, and again, I’m trying to put my mind into this tertiary market because as you mentioned, we tend to work in the larger markets and it’s a much different game there. But in the tertiary market, let’s just face some simple facts here. The economics of personal injury practices are often much different than they are for other practice areas, contingency fee versus hourly. And if you’ve been a contingency personal injury lawyer, are you putting that position at risk? And so the worst thing that can happen is, is that you go all in on law in general, you grow the total number of addressable legal services consumers across practice areas, but you end up losing some of those people that would’ve otherwise chosen you because they thought you were the person for personal injury. And maybe they go with who they view in their local community as a specialist in personal injury. Like, oh, I was going to go with so-and-so. I like so-and-so, but gosh, it seems like so-and-so is just kind of like a gone this general lawyer route, so I’m going to go choose this other person as a specialist. I think that’s the major question, trade off. But in a tertiary market, maybe consumers aren’t making that kind of decision. It’s much more about, I know this lawyer and I like this lawyer than it is this lawyer is a specialist on this thing.

Conrad Saam:

I think that’s actually the reality and my next push, if that is accurate, does this then bleed into a secondary market or a primary market? Could this be a strategy elsewhere? And I’m increasingly thinking as you and I talk more and more and more about the value of being liked and known, the expansion can be, could you be the law firm in Seattle? There are definite trade-offs. And I think what’s happened, Gyi, is SEO has really pushed focus. We talked about deleting practice area, we talked about deleting content, focus, focus, focus, focus. And it’s a basic obvious concept, right? People want to hire a specialist, even though you can’t call yourself a specialist, but you want to hire someone who’s focused. And so we have bought into this, I have bought into this for years, decades, literally decades. The funny thing is, Gyi, it feels like it might be coming back to the original model of the local law firm.

The local law firm probably did lots of things. And there’s examples of that. I’ll use an example we use on this podcast on occasion, Martinson and Beeson in Huntsville, Alabama. This is their model. They do all these things. They do all sorts of different practice areas. They’re not a massive firm, but they’re very well known and very well loved in Huntsville, Alabama. I have done clients like this in secondary and tertiary markets. They typically tend to be that law firm that has been around for a hundred plus years, which Martinson and Beeson is, there’s other examples of this where they were the place that you went to, they were the place that you did your wedding and you did your estate planning. And when you bought a house on the east coast, because you have to have a lawyer to buy a house on the east coast, you use that same firm. And I’m thinking maybe this starts to come back when we are dealing with brand affinity and finding ways to build brand affinity.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it’s funny, we talked about this briefly, but I was on this criminal mastermind recently, so this is all criminal defense lawyers with Jra Wayne’s group. And this very issue came up. Lawyers were like, Hey, I want to add injury. And to your point, everybody’s, gosh, Google has ruined everything so hyper-focused on SEO. So the conversation kind of devolved into like, well, what’s the impact of adding practice area pages for personal injury on my criminal defense side? And I’m like, there is a real consequence there from an SEO perspective, but I’m like, let’s not be so SEO myopic, myopic, myopic, myopic. I don’t know why I say

Conrad Saam:

Myopic. I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Myopic. I say myopic. Let’s not be so SEO myopic because this is one small sliver. And by the way, we’re old SEO guys and

Conrad Saam:

We are old SEO guys. We’re younger than the Olympian.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I’m telling everybody diversify. If you’re 80% of your strategy or your intake right now is coming from organic, I’d be like, you better diversify immediately. And so again, trade-offs and there’s tactically, there’s things you can do. You can have separate sites and there’s ways to handle this so that you’re doing it in a way that you’re not confusing the machines. From a local SEO standpoint though, look, you get one primary practice area per office location and you get one primary practice area per practitioner page. And every time you add a practice area, you’ve got to market the heck out of it. So anyway, that conversation went into these things that you and I probably talked about ad nauseum about how to deploy a multi-practice area firm. But again, the thing I keep trying to remind myself in this conversation is that you’re not marketing practice areas. You’re marketing that you’re a lawyer

Conrad Saam:

And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re leaning into the affinities you have in the community versus that I’m an expert on X, y, and Z thing.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I want to put this framework out there because I think it’s important. I thought what you were going to say was if you’re doing criminal defense and you want to move into personal injury, you can’t throw on a trucking accident case on your criminal defense site and get trucking accident cases. That’s not how this shit works. It’s actually that is counterproductive and stupid because you are going from a pure competitive perspective. You are going up in competitiveness. It’s like moving from the suburbs into downtown. From a location perspective, it’s doing that. The same thing from a practice area perspective. On the flip side, Gyi, and the reason we started with personal injury as this conversation, it works from a conceptual perspective, but I think you need to think about for everyone else, for everyone, where are you in the competitive set of your market?

So if you’re a successful on pi, the potential to add other practice areas and continue success is very real. If you are in estate planning and you want to add trucking accident cases or brain injury cases, that’s just stupid. So I think you need to understand the hierarchy of where you are from a competitive set, which you can do for your own individual market from a competitive research perspective. Or you can use a very simplistic framework, personal injury, criminal, defense, family, everything else. And so as you go down the opportunity tactically to be successful, if successful in criminal defense, you can move into immigration for example.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So when you say that, are you applying that framework across every channel? Because I certainly agree with you in the context of search direct response,

Conrad Saam:

Not every channel, it doesn’t equate. And in fact, in some channels, in some channels, it is problematic. There’s a great post by Darren Shaw yesterday, the day before. I’ll see if I can find it and throw it in the show notes talking about, this was really fascinating. I sent it to my peeps internally talking about this exact question. He wasn’t talking about it for legal, but he was basically saying, your best practice here is to have a separate Google business profile because of the importance of the primary category. So a separate business profile with a different primary category, estate planning, family, criminal defense, whatever it might be, a separate website, a separate phone number, separate name. So all of those things. Now you have the problem in local search specifically. Now you have the problem of why we’ve been pushing specialization all of the time.

And so you need to think about every single channel is going to function fundamentally differently from an SEO perspective. The more concentrated you are, the better off you’re going to play from other perspectives. The diversification is actually the right answer. And so you need to look at your assets and liabilities, your competitive set, what you currently do and determine whether or not this works for you. But I do think there are cases, and especially in the smaller markets, to be all things to all people firm. And that’s much more cost effective than getting another personal injury client, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right. And with that, dear listeners, we are out of time. Thank you so much for dropping in for this edition of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. As always, if you’re new here, please do subscribe, leave a review, hit us up online with your questions, join us for office hours on Thursdays. We are greatly appreciative of your attention. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi, we’re out of here.

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