In April, Google really messed up the national directories like us. They are favoring local websites more, as compared to national websites / directories. Why are they doing that? Because Google has now gotten a lot better at seeing when someone is searching Google for something local. So, if a person is looking for a DUI lawyer and he types in DUI lawyer, well what’s better to show the person if they are in Pittsburg Pennsylvania? It’s better to show them Pittsburg attorneys, not people from California or not from national directories. It only makes sense to show them more local stuff.
And again, Google has gotten smarter, especially since this last April, so while the national directories like us have been hit by Google local update, our leads have gone down by 50%. All the people you get leads from are experiencing the same effect, so there has been a big scramble and we realize providing leads only is not enough. We have learnt a lot of ways to really improve attorney’s practices and do marketing that’s really effective for them besides just giving them leads.
So here’s what we can do for you:
Book Offer – How It Works And How It Can Help You
We have our book offer, where we can do a recorded phone call with you, and have you literally speak a book in one hour. In one hour we record a call, let’s say we talk about DUI. An average person can speak about eight thousand words of content, so if you add pictures to that and a table of contents and a cover and all that stuff and have it printed up in a eight and a half inch by five and a half inch paper back, it comes to be about a 60 page book.
And you know what? You can use that in a bunch of different ways.
Number One:
What we do is, we get the transcript of the recorded call, and we put it on your website. Now THAT is going to add 5,000 – 8,000 more words of content on your website which helps your Google search visibility.
Number Two: We make it into a PDF and we make a picture of the book. We put it on your website so people coming to the site can download the book. When they download it they get to put in their name, e-mail and a phone number so they become a lead for you. A lead gets e-mailed to you and as you know they become a viable lead.
Number Three: we send you a hundred printed copies of the book and what we suggest is that you hand them out in three different situations.
- A potential client comes into your office, they talk to you, they don’t sign the retainer agreement right then and there. Hand down this book and tell them “here’s the book I wrote on the XYZ law that’s affecting you, it has a lot of useful information, I think it will really help you in making a decision”. At the same time, ideally, what you should do is hand them a sheet of testimonials, hand them, a one page piece of paper saying please review us on Google, also hand them a journal, where they can journal what happens to them so when they come back to you they have all the details of what happened to them before, during and after their arrest so you can better help them.
- You should do the same thing, book, testimonials, journal, letter, odd stuff but send it out by direct mail. And here’s how you do it. Let’s say a potential calls your office, you get on the phone with them, talk to them for fifteen twenty minutes and they don’t schedule an appointment, they say alright I’m going to talk to some other attorney’s. Well what you need to do at the beginning of a call is, your secretary or you need to say, “You know someone will speak with you in a moment. In case we get cut off, just let me get your name and address”. Then at the end of the call again if the person does not make an appointment you say to them, “You know what, I’ve got some real useful information that covers even more than what we talked about. Let me get it out in the mail to you, it’s free, there’s no obligation and I think you’re going to find it extremely useful to help you in deciding to find the right lawyer.”
- Another situation where you should do that is again, same thing, phone call, the person does make an appointment but let’s say it’s for four days from now or three days from now. During that time the person’s usually going to be approached by family members saying oh don’t go with him, uncle Bob is an attorney, hire him, he will help you out, or other attorney’s maybe calling this person bugging them, trying to get their business, offering them discount prices. In the mean time, they get this package in the mail from you and they say Wow , this guy is an author! Huh! He really knows what he’s talking about, alright well, I think I’m going to go with him, or if I have an appointment alright, you know I’m going to show up with this guy. It just amends your credibility your authority and all that stuff with potential clients.
Reviews – How To Get A LOT Of Them
So besides the book, reviews are very important for you to get. You might be very busy, but there is an easy way to get reviews.
Ask everyone you come in contact with, Hey can you go on Google and review us?
You don’t ask you don’t get. Not everyone’s going to say yes, but maybe 20, 30% of the potentials you talk to or the clients you have will do it. So to make it easy for them, we’ve got a one page printed sheet which says “review is the life blood of our practice”, please go on Google and type this in Google and you’ll see our listing and you can post a review, it really helps us out, we really appreciate it. Obviously we are not telling you to put a good or bad review, it’s your choice, depending on your actual experience, but please do this.
Journal – Help Your Clients Remember Everything
Third thing, a journal. When people are arrested for DUI or whatever crime it is, what happens to them before the arrest, during the arrest and after the arrest, once they have been released on bond or non-bond. People’s memories fade, time passes, and you know stuff happens. By the time they get with an attorney, if it’s a couple of days later, not only do they do not want to relive the experience but they have forgotten a lot about it. So they just document everything that happened to them in a journal that has your law firm name on every single page, if they put stuff in there, one, they will be a lot better prepared to speak to an attorney, and two, it has your name on it, you gave it to them for free, who are they going to call? You. Because it’s a nice thing you gave them for free. So that’s the whole point of the journal.
SEO & PPC (Pay Per Click) Management
In addition, we do search engine optimization, SEO, we do pay per click management. The way we do that is different from all the other companies we are going to talk about or talk to and here is why. Here’s the two things that make SEO work, One, is content. Good stuff not garbage, like a DUI is a serious offense, when facing a Los Angeles DUI, it’s important to find a secure Los Angeles DUI lawyer. Ok, there are a lot of article out there and its garbage. If we do one call a month with an attorney even for half hour, they are going to get about 4000 new words a month on their website, keeps the website fresh, lot of great content, it’s all correct content cause the attorney spoke it, it’s not something articles writer wrote, its good stuff. That’s going to help tremendously. You do an hour a month, its 8000 words, even better.
The other part of SEO is links, getting links from other sites to the attorney’s site. We do that on an ongoing basis, the more links you have, the more quality ones, not just garbage ones, where you get 500 links a month for 500 bucks, but quality ones, the better your site is going to show up on Google. And the more content you have, the more searches it is going to show up for. And again as I’ve talked to you about, it’s meaningless to show up for just a few searches in Google. You want to show up for thousands of different searches, about the areas of law you practice, and that is possible if you do the SEO right.
Pay-per-click, same thing, a lot of attorney’s blow thousands of dollar every month on Pay-per-click, and they get nothing out of it, cause there is a lot of optimization that needs to be done in Pay-per-click to make it worth it. Otherwise it’s worse than any strip club you have been to. They just take your money and leave you with nothing.
Direct Mail
Attorney’s do jailor mailers. They’ll mail a hundreds or thousands of direct mail pieces every month trying to get clients. Well, there are many different types of letters that can be written, and split tested to see which ones work better, you can do a sequence of mailings, yes that’s more expensive, but yes it’s a lot more effective. Let’s say you do a series of three post cards. First post card is green, second one is yellow, third one is red. They go out day one, day three, day five. Well guess what, everyone else stops mailing after day one, so day three and day five, these post cards come in a vacuum, and the message in them gets more urgent as you go along, a very effective way to do mail.
Also, we have what is called 3D mail. Well we can send the your letter inside a mini trash can, literally the trash can arrives at the persons door, they are going to open that thing up and say What is This? Your letters inside. That means your letter is going to get opened 90% of the time, where everyone else is going to get their letter opened maybe 5% of the time, because there are 50 other letters just like it. We can also send the letter inside of a bank bag, you know those little canvas purses with a zipper, you can bring money to the bank. A third one is a pill bottle, it’s like a gigantic bottle that you can put pills in, we can send that it’s real cheap. You put your letter inside; you say you have the prescription for potential legal help for the person. Again that’s going to get opened if someone gets out in the mail, because they are going to say What is This? So direct mail can make a huge impact in that area.
Keep Track Of Everything
Another area is cutting out waste, a lot of attorneys just don’t track what they do. They have no clue if Pay-per-click is working for them or if they are blowing money. They have no clue if direct mails working. They’ve no clue if ABC lead service is really getting them clients or yellow pages or referrals. You know which service provides them what kind of referrals. You know, let’s say, yellow pages provides only expungements or things like that, but this online lead service, like ABC lead service provides a lot of good felony cases. Or this other service like AVVO let’s say, provides a lot of good DUI cases. Which ones should we keep, which ones should we cut out? So save your money. Your marketing will get a lot better if you track everything.
How many phone calls is your site generating in a month? How many, people are filling out your web form on your website in a month? Where are they coming from, you don’t track this stuff, you are blind, and you are going to be taken advantage of by all these companies that are coming after you. Wanting money from your pocket. And you know we can shine a light on all these things and teach you how to track everything, and that’s like kind of the heart of running your practice. You’ll know what’s working what’s not, why, and it’s just far better to do it that way.