Getting Seen, Getting Heard, Getting Hired In the Digital Jungle

Episode Notes

Transcript

Christopher T. Anderson:  Before we start the show, I would like to say thank you to our sponsors.  Alert Communications, Law Clerk, Lawyaw and Scorpion.

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Male Speaker:  Managing your law practice can be challenging.  Marketing, time management, attracting clients and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable.  Welcome to this edition of The Un-Billable Hour, the law practice advisory podcast.  This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host Christopher Anderson here on Legal Talk Network.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Welcome to the Un-Billable Hour, I am your host, Christopher Anderson, and today’s episode is about acquisition.  It’s been a while, actually, since we’ve talked about acquisition, but if you’ll remember in the main triangle of what it is that a law firm business must do, acquisition is the first one that we talk about.  It’s acquiring new clients.  The other two legs of the triangle are producing results that you promised, in other words producing the legal work and achieving the business and professional results for the owners or the results.  I’ve been avoiding the topic a little bit just because it’s so easy, there’s so much marketing content out there, some of it better than others.  But it seems like what everybody wants to hear and everybody wants to talk about and the Un-Billable Hours all about giving you as a law firm owner or a someone who may want to be what you actually need.  But the truth is you need some of this, too.

It is a cornerstone of our business.  If there is one of the legs of the triangle that is a sine quantum, it’s acquiring new clients, because without that, the business won’t last very long.  I am pleased to introduce my guest to Jason Hennessey.  He’s the CEO of Hennessey Digital, and Jason is an internationally recognized the SEO expert.  He’s an author, a speaker, an entrepreneur, and a business executive since 2001.  So, for more than 20 years now, Jason has been reversed engineering the Google algorithms, and I’m going to be talking to him about that.  He’s a self-taught student and practitioner of SEO which if anybody doesn’t know, I would think everybody knows.  But anyway, it says search engine optimization and search marketing, and I’ll ask him to explain what the difference between those two things are.

He’s been running a Hennessey Digital since 2015.  He’s got a team of over 100, Digital Marketing Experts working with him, and he’s an authority in Legal SEO.  He’s grown this business into a $10 million plus business.  He’s inked 5000 for the second year in a row, and he’s been a keynote speaker, a webinar host, frequent podcast guest, and Jason loves teaching what he knows.  He’s also a US Air Force veteran, holds a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing, and he’s from New York which I could appreciate.  Jason launched his career in Las Vegas, but he’s been also working in the legal industry here in Atlanta, but he’s living in Los Angeles.  He’s got his wife there with him, Bridget three children and he is rocking it with law firms across the country.  So, Jason with that introduction, just tell me a little bit more about how did you get into this?  What got you started reverse engineering Google’s Algorithms?

Jason Hennessey:  Yeah.  The story goes back to 2001, and by the way, thanks for that kind of introduction.  I appreciate it and I’m honored to be on the episode here.  So, it goes back to about 2001, and at the time I was just getting out of the United States Air Force.  I was DJing.  I was a wedding DJ go figure.  And I was DJing weddings on the weekends and I was advertising in the yellow pages at the time at work.  I had a radio show.  I was advertising in the bridal magazines, but being in Las Vegas, I couldn’t tap into the brides that were coming to Las Vegas as a destination wedding.

And so that prompted me to create a website called Vegas Wedding Mall at the time and I paid a developer about $5,000 to develop the website.  After it was developed three months later, I’m like, by the way, Stalin, who is the developer.  I’m not getting anybody to the website.  Is it broken?  And he’s like, oh, no.  That’s called SEO or something.  I don’t do that, and so, I’m like, oh, well, I guess I’m already into this.  I got to figure this out myself, and so I bought some books and I read them and I bought more books and then from there it just became a passion of mine, and so you practice strategies and techniques, it works, and then you continue just apply new strategies and techniques.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Okay.  Well, that makes sense.  But one of the things that was in your intro, and I know you talk about it in your book which we’ll get to in a minute, but I said you reverse engineered and you just said you studied Google and you read some books.  You figured it out and now you’re helping other people figure it out.  But one of the things that I wondered about when I read that is like doesn’t Google continually change what it does to try to thwart exactly what you do?

Jason Hennessey:  They do.  Yeah.  So, they have these updates.  There are some core principles to SEO that if you follow, you won’t have a whole lot to worry about.

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But at the end of the day, what happens is it’s very transparent, right?  When you do a Google search for something right?  You’re going to see the top three results, right?  And if you’ve been studying this for so long, you can start to look at the patterns, right?  There tools that you can use which I know we’ll talk about as well, but we can understand.  Okay, what does the content look like?  Does this number one result have a video?  Is the site loading fast?  Do they have other websites linking back to?  What type of links do they have?  What’s the value of each link?  So, over 20 years, you really start to understand all of the micro variables that kind of matter, and then from there, you just start to put the patterns together, and then it becomes very clear what the top three websites are doing that the sites that are on page 100 on Google are not doing, right?  Does that make sense?

Christopher T. Anderson:  It does.  It sounds like when I first sort of read the words reverse engineering, it almost sounds like your kind of hacking it.  But I think from what I’m hearing you is like you said, first of all, there are some principles that if you follow that’s the meat and potatoes of it, and then doing some of this research as to what is serving other business as well helps you to understand where to emphasize the good practices.

Jason Hennessey:  That’s exactly right.  And a good example is like if you look at Wikipedia, right?  If you do a search for Google for just about anything from the word baseball to Babe Ruth to whatever.  There’s a probably good chance you’re going to see Wikipedia ranking in the top three or five positions on Google, right?  Why?  It’s because they became such a subject matter expert on everything, and then when you go to that page, they’ve got references, they got citations, they’re linking correctly to different pages using exact match anchor text.  The blue links that are linking to it is sending Google a signal that the relevancy of the next preceding page is probably about that word.  So, not only do I just study the legal market and from competing in a very competitive market, like, let’s just say Orlando.  A car accident keyword, which people are spending $400-$500 a click for.  I’ll start to study even the bigger websites.  What is Wikipedia doing?  What is the Coca Cola’s of the world doing?  Especially like an Amazon, and so from there, you start to understand, like I said, the variables of what it takes.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Yeah.  What would make sense about that tome is like that I can’t imagine or maybe they do like someplace like Wikipedia.  Are they really worried about SEO or are they just rocking it because like you said, they’ve got all that relevant content?

Jason Hennessey:  Yeah.  Once you get to a point, you don’t necessarily need to worry specifically about SEO.  Sure, you want to make sure that you have your foundation of how you’re building and optimizing pages, right?  But from there, what happens is a site like Amazon because so many people have heard of Amazon and everybody links to it, you start to gain authority just by way of the brand that you’ve built, and so sometimes an authoritative website will start to supersede like all of the micro things that you can do to change on the web page, right?  Just because it’s such an authoritative force and Google needs to rank that website higher, right?

Christopher T. Anderson:  Right.  That makes sense.  And yeah, we all hope to get there.  But in the meantime, not only do you help law firms directly with this and bring your expertise to bear to improve their marketing, but you wrote a book.  Tell me about the book.  What did you write, why?

Jason Hennessey:  Yeah.  So, I wrote the book.  It’s called — this way I could say I wrote the book on law firm SEO.  It’s been something – 

Christopher T. Anderson:  They heard it, it’s called Law Firm SEO, right?

Jason Hennessey:  That’s the name of it.  It’s called Law Firm SEO and there’s reasons why I named it Law Firm SEO.  There’s SEO reasons why I named it Law Firm SEO, right?  If you did a Google search right now, you would see that there are people that are bidding for that keyword, right?  For pay per click.  But then I actually have the whole right knowledge panel because of the name of the book.  So, I’ve got this ad there for that term, that’s important.  So anyway, those are the SEO reasons.  But the true reason why I wrote the book is not even so much to get new business and to get new customers.  That’s all part for the course.  The real reason why I wrote the book is because by the time I personally speak to somebody that is looking to get out of a contract or is looking for a new partner.  I just hear all of those dreaded stories of like, yeah, I’ve been paying this SEO provider thousands of dollars and I feel like I’ve gotten burned and the expectations were aligned.

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Honestly, I wrote the book so that like law firms are empowered to make better decisions and educated on holding people accountable to getting the results that they’re looking for.  It was written in an everyday language.  So, if you were to buy a book about SEO and you go to Barnes and Noble or Amazon, there’s a good chance that it’s going to be in the computer engineering section, right?  It’s a little intimidating, right?  This book is not written for somebody that understands code.  And so, if you read the book, you’ll be able to get principles of how SEO works so that you can either do it yourself if you want or hold somebody else accountable to doing it for you.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Yeah.  And in fact, I think I remember reading somewhere that you yourself don’t consider yourself a coder really.

Jason Hennessey:  I’m not.  No, believe it or not, no.  I understand like the language, I can speak intelligently about it and I can tell whether or not somebody that is a coder did something right or wrong.  But no, personally I do not sit in the dark room and code myself.  That’s not my skill set.  Yeah.

Christopher T. Anderson:  I think coders out there go like, “We don’t sit into our tombs man.  We are on our laptops at the beach now.”

Jason Hennessey:  That’s right.  Yeah.  Trading cryptocurrency on the weekends and stuff, right? Yeah, exactly.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Yeah.  All right.  My guest today is Jason Hennessey.  He’s a CEO of Hennessey Digital.  We’ve been talking about SEO just a little bit and his book.  We’re going to take a break here, Jason.  Let the sponsors have a say and we’re going to come back.  I’m going to ask you why law firms?  You wrote and you figured out SEO.  Why did you write a book about law firms?  But first, let’s hear from our sponsors.

[Music]

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Christopher T. Anderson:  And I’m back with Jason Hennessey.  He’s a CEO of Hennessey digital and we’ve just learned the author of Law Firm SEO.  In fact, yup, he wrote the book on Law Firm as SEO.  So, right before the break, I suggest I was going to ask you this question and I am.  There’s a lot of people, a lot of businesses out there who could use an expert on SEO.  Why do you focus on law firms?

Jason Hennessey:  Hey you know what, I accidentally stumbled into this business back in 2008, this specific niche.  I was doing SEO mostly for myself.  I was doing some affiliate marketing.  I did some stuff back in the day in the poker industry and the online casino stuff.  Right?  So really competitive spaces and then one day somebody asked me, “Hey, I’ve got a group of attorneys that asked me to come and speak about marketing.  Would you mind kind of tagging along and kind of giving them maybe like, a little taste of like what SEO looks like.”  Right?  And so, I sat there I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t know much about legal marketing, but why don’t I just put together a presentation on how I was able to rank on Google for the word wedding favors.”  Right?  And I just kind of give them the exact principles, it’s the same principles, but, it’s not, you just kind of optimize for your keywords.  So, I got up there and I was very transparent, there’s about 50 lawyers.  It was in Atlanta in Roswell, Georgia, actually, 50 DUI lawyers.  I got on stage.  I gave them a presentation, fully transparent of how I was able to rank number one on the Google for wedding favors.

Once I got off of the stage about 45 minutes later, I had about six attorneys come up to the stage saying, “Hey, that was really awesome.  I appreciate how transparent you are, I learned so much.  You know, this something that you do like as a consultant.”  And I’m like, “Well, not really, but give me a card and maybe we’ll talk, right?”  And so, there was opportunity there.  And so, I walked away with like I said about six business cards and probably about 30,000 35,000 thousand dollars per month in consulting revenue.  And so, I’m like, okay, there’s something on to this.  And so, I started to coach a couple of the attorneys.  And then from there we built a case study and that case study, we used then to get leverage and sell to other lawyers.

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And then from there, you start to grow your team.  You start to grow your business and the rest is history.  And so, this was back at my old agency back in 2008.  I’ve since built that agency and sold it and now I’m doing at my own agency.

Christopher T. Anderson:  That makes sense.  So, it’s sort of serendipitous.  Let me hit you with a question I know my listeners are thinking about, maybe I think if they’ve been doing this for any period of time, they’ve got to be thinking about it, which is, as lawyers we are besieged.  We are inundated with two competing messages.  One, forget about SEO, paid search is what’s important.  And forget about paid search, SEO is what’s important.  And then there’s probably a lot of lawyer listeners right now going like, “What’s really the difference?  What’s the difference in SEO?  What’s SEM and paid search?”  So, can you just speak to like how they play together and why SEO is important and maybe why paid search is also important, but like what’s your perspective on it?

Jason Hennessey:  Yeah, absolutely.  And it’s not one or the other, right?  At the end of the day, if you’ve got all your tracking in place and you invest $10,000 in your personal injury lawyer let’s just say, if you invest $10,000 and then you get 10 leads, right?  Well, then your average cost per lead is a thousand dollars per lead.  If you sign two cases, then you know that your average cost per sign case is 5000, right?  I mean, is that good?  Is that bad?  Right?  It just kind of depends, right?  If you get three cases, well then maybe your average cost per sign case drops down to like three thousand dollars, right?  At the end of the day, if that’s profitable for you and you’re able to kind of take the demand, keep investing in that channel, right?  So, that’s that.  That’s perfectly fine.  But the difference between pay per click in SEO is that, that is a, it’s a sunk cost, right?  You’re not really building an asset per se, you’re really just renting space on Google.  The space is converting, right?  The moment that you shut that off, right?  You’re not going to continue to get.

Christopher T. Anderson:  It end, it’s over.

Jason Hennessey:  Yeah, you’re not going to — so SEO is the way that you actually start to really build your asset.  So, what you do is, you learn from what you’re doing from a pay per click perspective and you’re seeing which keywords are converting, and then you’re speaking to your SEO side of the business that’s actually building out content so that you start to get some more of that presence within the organic search results, right?  So, they both play well together.  But again, SEO over the long term typically tends to be the lowest cost per sign case because you write one page of content today and about three or four months that page of content will start to generate some phone calls.  But also, in about three to five years that same page of content is generating phone calls, right?  So that’s basically how I like to explain that to you.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Yeah.  And one of the funny things is, I mean, in my business, we’ve got one page that we wrote, and it is now in its fifth year of being the number one traffic page and it’s nothing special.  Like, it’s just like, people like it.  I don’t know, we can’t figure it out but you bet your bottom dollar that we keep it on there.

Jason Hennessey:  I can explain that.  Right?  So, what happens is, whatever that page is about, it satisfies the intent of whoever it is that is searching for that information.  And the thing about it is, Google uses what is referred to as user signals, right?  So, when somebody’s doing a Google Search and you’re on the first page of Google, and you’re in position to, Google’s measuring the time that somebody actually clicks on your page and how long they stay there before they click back to Google.  Right?  So, you must have a really good piece of information about whatever somebody searching for that’s satisfying the intent of somebody that’s searching because they’re probably staying on that page longer and Google feels like it needs to be there.  Right?  So, if they go back and then they go to the second result and you know, I mean, so that’s probably why.

Christopher T. Anderson:  That’s really interesting.  Because, I mean it would have — and that also means like you’re not only sure your content be good, but it should be something that’s going to keep someone stuck a little while which is fascinating.

Jason Hennessey:  And you need to take off your — in some cases, like sometimes lawyers get in the habit of just hiring writers to write content and they’re not really paying attention.  I often tell lawyers like, “Go to a Google Search, see if you are ranking or just even read your own content.  And would you hire yourself like, after you read your own content.”  Right?  And the answer is no.  Well, guess what?  Go back to the drawing board, right?  Another mistake, I see people make too, is like somebody will do a Google Search and let’s just say your result starts with like statistics, right?  “Hey, I was in a car accident.  I’m looking for a lawyer.”

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Well, did you know that 3,000 people get into accident like nobody cares about the statistics of that.  Like just help me solve my problem, right?  So, get inside the mind and the psyche of the person that’s doing a search.

Jason Hennessey:  That’s yeah.  That’s really, really important.  Listen, when we when we started talking about it, you already started spouting off some things like you can derive your average cost per landed client or average cost per lead and those are important metrics.  I think it’s important for — because quite honestly a lot of people who are out there selling marketing solutions, talk about statistics that I think are less important.  So, I wanted to get your take on what lawyers should be using as tools or metrics to measure success of SEO.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Well again, those two, right?  So, the average cost per lead and the average cost per acquisition, right?  So, those are the two that are most important in my opinion.  And I think the Digital Marketing partners that you work with should have the same goals align, right?  That’s it.  Now, one thing that the digital marketer can’t control is how well you sell, right?  Like if you’re answering the phone, so if they’re delivering cost per lead at a low rate and then your, for whatever reason is not converting them.  Well, then maybe you need to look at your intake team, that might be an issue.  But everything else is more like a means to an end.  So, like I can look at your traffic.  I could look at things like there’s third-party tools to see like, what is your page speed of your website.

I could look at a tool called SEMrush to see how many keywords are you ranking for?  Is that number of growing?   I can look at how many pages of content are you publishing on a regular basis?  So, there’s all of these different variables that you can look at.  But those are all kind of like a means to an end and the end is truly generating leads a new business.

Jason Hennessey:  Yeah, otherwise it’s just vanity.  Okay, so those are some of the metrics.  How about thinking, when if a law firm and I know I’m just picking stuff out of your book, but I think it’s, you know folks should read your book first of all.  Like I know you’re not going to pitch it, but I’m going to pitch it folks to read the book.  It’s important for everybody to understand these things.  To me, not a replacement for work with someone who actually knows what they’re doing, but it helps you be a really great customer for my opinion.  With that being said, what should law firm owner or law firm marketing director, be thinking about as the most important elements of an SEO strategy.  Like what should the SEO strategy be built out of?

Christopher T. Anderson:  It really comes down to three core principles.  So, the first thing is making sure that you’ve got a site that is technically sound, let’s just say.  So, that’s probably something that you can do yourself.  You need to — if you did read my book, I would basically explain like all the things that you should be looking for to make sure that your site is technically sound and that Google can’t actually crawl it.  Because everything else that I’m about to talk about doesn’t matter if Google is blocked and he can’t read your website.  So that’s the first thing is that.  The second piece is a content strategy you need to be publishing content on a regular basis that is going after whoever your targeted audiences, right?  And that should be a strategy.  Not somebody just randomly blogging twice a month, right?  There need to be a strategy, right?  That’s another mistake that I see people made, so content is super important.

Again, if we use the Wikipedia example, why is Wikipedia rank for everything?  Is because they became such a subject matter expert on every single thing that you can think about.  So, how can you replicate the Wikipedia model in your specific industry, in your specific market?  Think about that from a content perspective.  And then the third piece is just popularity.  How do you get your brand out there?  You know, you can do things by, like, signing up for the better business bureau you should probably be listed on a lot of the legal directories.  You should do relationships with schools and government.  And try to get your word out there so that people talk about you and link back to you.  Setting up all your social media channels, using social and then if you do those things, so your technical SEO, your content strategy, and your popularity that’s really the recipe for a good SEO strategy.

Jason Hennessey: Okay.  Well, that makes total sense.  What I’d like to do is drill down a little bit with you on the content piece.  But first, let’s listen to some content from our sponsors so they can pay for the show.  And we’ll come back and talk about SEO content and specific kinds of it, but first, a word from our sponsors.

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(00:25:00)

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Christopher T. Anderson:  And we’re back with Jason Hennessey, the CEO of Hennessey Digital and before the break, we talked about the strategies and then the three quarter of strategies of the successful SEO strategy or the three components of an SEO strategy.  But I said I wanted to drill down now on content which was one of them.  But I think you’ve already alluded to this Jason, but I think it’s just so important to re-emphasize that content is not something — it’s not gasoline, it’s not salt, it’s not a commodity that you go out and go buy yourself some content.  Like you mentioned, like getting somebody else to write a lot of stuff for your website because it needs content so I go out and buy some content.  That seems to be contrary to what you were talking about.  So, I just wanted you to go a little bit deeper here.  You mentioned the content is critical.  What do you mean by that?  And what kind of content really pays?

Jason Hennessey:  Yeah, so there’s lots of lots of forms of content, right?  You’ve got text content, video content, images, et cetera, et cetera.  But really what you should be focusing on is creating both transactional content and I’ll explain what I mean and informational content.  So, a transactional page for a law firm would be like if you live in Miami and your car accident lawyer you want to have or let’s just say your personal injury lawyer.  You want to make sure that you have a Miami car accident lawyer paid.  You want to have a Miami dog bite accident page.  You might want to have a Miami slip and fall accident page.  So, those are called transactional pages.  So, when somebody lands on that page, they probably need you because they were affected by one of those practice areas.  And it’s a direct response, right?  The other content that you really need to also include is more of the informational content.  Like things, like, how do I get a police report in the State of Florida?  Right?  You see what I’m saying, right?

Christopher T. Anderson:  Okay, yeah.

Jason Hennessey:  You see I’m saying, right?  So those are kind of different – I’m trying to capture a different part of the funnel of where somebody might be doing a surge.  If you are a criminal defense lawyer, how do I find out if somebody was arrested?  Like writing content so that you’re actually capturing people at the different funnel.  But it’s super important that you actually have a strategy.  Because if you don’t and people are just publishing content at well, you’re doing yourself a disservice and Google is that you’re actually hurting your SEO by just doing it.  Because the way in which you link to pages? You can cause what is referred to a cannibalization problem.  So, there’s all kinds of things that that happened as a result.

Christopher Anderson: Interesting.  You mentioned about the cannibalization.  So, you’re saying that like with content that you — if you’re not strategic, if you’re not — like the word up think I’m looking for is conscious or intentional.  I think it is what I want to really say.  If you’re not intentional about the content that you’re adding.  You could actually dilute the effectiveness of the content that’s there?

Jason Hennessey:  You can.  Yes.  What happens is, if you have like, let’s just say you one page is optimized for Miami car accident lawyer.  And you think that you need to create another page that’s optimized for Miami car accident attorney.  Well, attorney and lawyers just semantics, right?  People that don’t know that might write two separate pages and as a result, it looks like you’re trying to manipulate the Google Search.  And so, as a result those two pages are now competing with each other.  Google sees that they don’t know which one to index.  And so therefore, as a result of that you might never be on the first page of Google, because you have multiple pages that are optimized for the same terms.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Okay, that makes sense.  In all of that as we were talking, you mentioned that one kind of content is video.  And some people I’ve heard like say, you know video is king.  You got a got video all over the place.  Got to have tons of video and some people like seem to stress it less.  What’s your take on video as part of the strategy?

Jason Hennessey:  So, from an SEO perspective, as I mentioned once you get onto the first page of Google, it really comes down to these user signals.  How do users engage with the pages that they see for that particular query?  And so, by putting a video that’s on your site, that’s on your page above the fold.  When somebody clicks on to your page.

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If there’s a video there, they might watch the video, right?  As long as it’s not like a 60 minutes documentary.  But if it’s like a two or three-minute video, they probably will watch the video.  A, is going to give them your personality, a sense of who you are as a company, but B, it’s going to keep them on the page a little bit longer, which is one of the most important signals.  So instead of them just hopping over and being there for seven seconds and hopping back, now they’re on the page for maybe like a minute and a half, two minutes. And so, Google’s measuring that time.  And so therefore, by having a video and keeping somebody on the page longer now, you’ll actually probably sit well into the top three results on Google for that particular query.

Christopher T. Anderson:  That makes total sense.  That’s one of those stickiness tools that we talked about earlier.  All of this makes perfect sense and I know when people read the book, they’ll learn these strategies and I’m sure there are plenty of agencies, plenty of vendors out there who will say that they do these strategies and a lot of them do.  I’m not trying to disparage anybody, but what I think a lot of lawyers as consumers, law firm owners and marketing directors as consumers of these services don’t know and the agencies or the marketing consultants don’t give them the tools that they need to say, you’re being successful, you’re not being successful.  You did what you said you’re going to do.  You didn’t do what you say you’re going to do.  Accountability tools.  How should they hold if somebody pays someone to help them with their SEO, how do they hold them accountable?

Jason Hennessey:  Selfishly, I’m just going to say you need to buy the book.  And I think even on Amazon it was like running for like $5 or $6.  They had it on such a big discount yesterday.  I’ve seen that and I genuinely mean that, right?  The only way that you’re really ever going to be able to understand this is to educate yourself, right?  You don’t need to be an expert, but you at least need to be educated so that you don’t get taken advantage of.  Because in this world of SEO and pay per click and all of the different jargon that we speak, like the geek talk, I guess, if you will.  You start to get overwhelmed and you get confused and because you’re overwhelmed and confused.  You just kind of block it out and then people can take advantage of you.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Yeah, and do.

Jason Hennessey:  And they do. And so that’s genuinely why I wrote the book and so that lawyers don’t get taken advantage of anymore.  That’s my main message with that.

Christopher T. Anderson:  I want them to get the book also.  But can you pull one thing?  If they were going to use one key metric to hold their people accountable, what would it be?

Jason Hennessey:  Well, the key metric would be, obviously number of how many phone calls are you getting, really?  Or how many leads in general are you getting, right?  So, if you’re spending $2,500 a month on SEO and you’re getting, I don’t know, 40 phone calls.  Well, that’s $62 per phone call.  Is that good or bad?  And how many of those phone calls are converting into new business?  But you really need to be set up to track this correctly and I think that’s another area where a lot of attorneys fall down is they don’t have the proper tracking set up.  And you say, how many new cases did you get from SEO?  Like, I have no clue, right?  And so, without that, then now it’s just a recipe for people to take advantage of you.

Christopher T. Anderson:  Yeah.  So tracking is key on this and can be done with tracking numbers on the website and other forms to make sure, because a lot of people are pretty good at tracking their spend on pay per click on search engine or paid search, if you will, but less good about stuff that comes in through the website and other sources.

Jason Hennessey:  And there are ways that you can set it up.  Just speak to a consultant and make sure that you got it.  It’s called dynamic call tracking is what you want.

Christopher T. Anderson:  All right man, we are right up close to the end of the show.  So, I was hoping you might think of either something we’ve talked about or something we haven’t talked about.  But if our listeners wanted to take one key takeaway from what you’re putting out there, what would it be?

Jason Hennessey:  The biggest thing is, go to your own website, click around, read some of the content and if you wouldn’t feel comfortable hiring yourself after reading the content or maybe it’s time to take a look at your digital marketing strategy.

Christopher T. Anderson:  I think that’s a great insight.  And that unfortunately, wraps up this edition of The Un-Billable Hour because there’s so much more we could cover.  But thank you to my listeners for staying with us.  And thank you, Jason, for being our guest.  Our guest one more time has been Jason Hennessey, he’s the CEO of Hennessey Digital.  And Jason, in case there’s like other things that people would like to follow up with you on and they don’t want to bug me about it because you’re the expert and I’m not, how would they get in touch with you?

(00:35:03)

Jason Hennessey:  Yeah, very easy.  Social media, I’m just at Jason Hennessey H-E-N-N-E-S-S-E-Y.  If you forget the E, that’s the good cognac.  And then my email is just [email protected].

Christopher T. Anderson:  Fantastic, thank you.  This of course, is Christopher T. Anderson, and I look forward to seeing you next month with another great guest as we learn more about topics that help us build a law firm business that works for you.  Remember that you can subscribe to all the editions of this podcast at legaltalknetwork.com or on iTunes.  Thanks for joining us and we will speak again soon.

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Male Speaker:  The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network.  Its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries.  None of the content should be considered legal advice.  As always, consult a lawyer.  Thanks for listening to The Un-Billable Hour.  The law practice advisory podcast.  Join us again for the next edition right here with Legal Talk Network.

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Christopher T. Anderson:  This March, The Un-Billable Hour podcast will be launching a second episode each month called the community table.  I’m the host, Christopher T. Anderson.  I’m a lawyer and law firm management consultant and each episode I will gather virtually with other lawyers across the country to help answer their questions.  These will be unscripted conversations that center around real issues lawyers are facing in their firms today.  We’ll discuss best practices for marketing, for time management, client acquisition, hiring, firing and much more.  Join our conversation each month on The Community Table part of The Un-Billable Hour podcast on the Legal Talk network.

Podcast transcription by Tech-Synergy.com