The Unveiled Truth: Making the Most of Legal Directories

Host: Alex Valencia, WDW

Guest: Jason Hennessey, Hennessey Digital

 

In this webinar, Alex Valencia of We Do Web and Jason Hennessey of Hennessey Digital measure the effectiveness of legal directories to see if the juice is worth the squeeze. Jason describes how to reverse engineer the value of legal directories. The secret sauce: SEO monitoring tools like SEMRush and Google Analytics. Don’t waste your time on call tracking provided by legal directories!

 

Learn how legal directories provide indirect law firm SEO value and get the scoop on choosing and negotiating with sales reps from the directories. 

 

Transcript: 

 

Narrator:

Welcome to the SEO Happy Hour podcast, with We Do Web Content. Listen up, marketers and small business owners. If you’re looking to get a better grasp on understanding how to use proven digital marketing techniques to grow your business, you are in the right place. On our SEO Happy Hour podcast, our team will teach you the proven techniques we use with our clients and interview the industry experts on marketing, SEO, content, social and more. Grab a drink and a seat, and here is your host, Alex Valencia.

Alex Valencia:

All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us on another episode of SEO Happy Hour with We Do Web Content. I’m your host, Alex Valencia, and today we’re going to be touching on legal directories. I know law firms struggle with this and they’re always looking for opportunities to figure out exactly what legal directories will provide them with the most value, good links, and the most cost effective.

So today, joining me is my partner, Jason Hennessy, who knows how to reverse engineer, and he is going to show us and talk to us about reverse engineering during the legal directories. Thanks again for watching and listening to SEO Happy Hour.

All right, awesome, thank you. So today we’re going to be talking about the truth about legal directories. This is a great topic. This is actually one of the largest webinars as far as attendees and… Well, actually registrants, attendees. We’re still waiting, so we’re going to wait a couple more minutes. Like I said, Jason flew in from LA to visit family in New York, so he is going to be jumping on here in a couple minutes. So again, thank you for taking time out of your day. We’re going to go through what legal directories you can be using, how to gain links, how to add content to some of those legal directories, how to negotiate with the legal directories, but first, I want to thank everyone who has signed up already for an SEO audit with us. Those have been going awesome. It’s crazy the amount of information that you learned by going through an audit about your website, whether it’s links, whether it’s technical health of your website, which is super important.

We recently did a video about SEO versus web development, so it’s important to know that they are two different skill sets. If someone recently redesigned or designed a website for you, it’s important that you have an SEO check the technical health of it to make sure it’s working for you so it’s marketable and it’s visible with the search engines. Little things like page speed, 301, 404 redirects, those are important things. Little small things like HTTPS or the length of time that you’ve purchased URL are good things to consider. So again, I’d like to thank everyone, who in the past couple months, has signed up for the free SEO audit. We’re still doing them. Make sure you email me or sign up on one of the emails. I’m sure it was at the bottom of one of the automation emails that you’ve been receiving.

So we’re going to be talking a little bit about FindLaw, AVVO, Lawyers.com. We’re going to show you how those show up in the SEO link management tools, and how to negotiate with some of those. I spoke to someone earlier this week on FindLaw, and some of the results, FindLaw’s a big agency. We actually use Lexus Nexus for a lot of our content research here at We Do Web Content, but we were talking about them at the fees that they were paying Lexus Nexus alongside with some of their web marketing deals. So maybe we can talk a little bit about that as well.

Great. Jason’s on. He should be on in just a couple minutes. I just made him presenter. Jason, if you’re on, we already have some great questions from the audience, so we’ll go ahead and table those for now, get you going, but we have some awesome questions. Again, thanks everyone for showing up. If you are jumping off, I haven’t decided on whether… I am recording, I’m definitely recording, but I don’t know if I’m going to send it out just yet, but I’ll let you know.

Jason Hennessy:

Perfect. Alex, can you hear me okay?

Alex Valencia:

Yep. Can everybody hear Jason?

Jason Hennessy:

Great, sorry about that. Yeah, the technical difficulties, as technology does. I’m calling in from a remote location today. I’m vacationing in New York with some family, so hello to anybody that’s out here.

Perfect.

Alex Valencia:

Great questions. I’m going to take this content question here real quick while you finish up. From Ed, “If you do web blogging, how do you make sure the content is different from what is provided to other attorneys?”

Ed, that’s an awesome question. So we’ve been writing for attorneys since 2008. We have a different level of writers and editors on staff that have to go through a strict training process. All of the content that we write is based on a consultation that we have with the attorney, and we assign different writers to it. So all the content’s always different. It’s very important that we’re writing unique content. Obviously, the topic is going to be similar across the board, because you have so many like-minded attorneys and practice areas, but the content always has to be original, and you didn’t ask this, but we’re writing practice area pages anywhere from 800 to 1200 word count. We’re seeing a lot of good traction and optimization and ranking because of this. Blog posts, depending on the blog post you’re writing, you can get away with 350 to 600 words, but the pages should be a little bit longer, but yes, I hope that answered your question, Ed.

Jason Hennessy:

Perfect. Good question. So Alex is making sure that you’re able to see my screen.

Alex Valencia:

I can see your screen. No video, but I can see your screen.

Jason Hennessy:

You know what? Let me try and let me share my webcam here. There we go. Does that work now?

Alex Valencia:

Here we go. Yep, we see you.

Jason Hennessy:

Perfect. Sorry guys. Yeah, I apologize for running a few minutes behind. The wifi connection here, I was just having a little trouble. So we’re all set, though. So this is going to be a good one. A lot of…

Alex Valencia:

Do you want to knock out some of these questions now, or do you want to go ahead and get running?

Jason Hennessy:

What, let’s see here, what are some of the questions? Why don’t you ask the questions and we’ll…

Alex Valencia:

So we’ve got a question from John. “What are the most important and biggest players to establish links?”

Jason Hennessy:

We’re going to talk a lot about that today. So yeah, before I answer that question, I think that will get addressed in… Bridget, I’ve got a camera. That will get addressed in the webinar that we’re going to do here. So yeah, we’ll definitely answer that one.

Alex Valencia:

Next one is client asked me, “Which directories of FindLaw should I use?” I think we’ll get into that. They’re leaving FindLaw in a few weeks, so they want to know what directories of FindLaw they should keep. So I think they’re going to probably touch on that.

Jason Hennessy:

You guys don’t even know the information that we’re going to get into today. It’s going to be so informative for you guys that are listening to this call, because I know that those directories are not cheap, and so I am going to help you to make a better educated decision on whether or not this is a good investment for you. In some cases, it’s going to be a great investment for some of you, and other cases, it might not. It really depends on which market you’re in, and I’m going to give you the tools that you can use to determine that in this presentation, and…

Alex Valencia:

Jason, you just hopped on. Some of the folks on here are new, they’re probably new to our webinars. Why don’t you give them a little history on your background, how long you’ve been a student of SEO and working with lawyers. Guys, my experience with Jason’s been absolutely amazing. I’ve known him for years. Happy to be working with him now. All right, go ahead, Jason.

Jason Hennessy:

Absolutely. So my name’s Jason Hennessy. I got into SEO back in 2001, back when Yahoo first created… Well, it wasn’t actually Yahoo, it was a company called Overture. Overture came out with this product, and there’s probably some old school marketers that are on this call that know what Overture is. If that is the case, maybe raise your hand by pushing a little button. I’m just curious to see, but Overture was basically, that was the genesis of what we know today as pay-per-click, and so when I realized that you can pay to be on the Yahoo search engine back then for keywords that people were searching in into that search engine, I thought that that was going to be marketing as we know it today. I thought that that was going to be the future of marketing.

So I purchased every book on the subject. Back then, there was a one guy that wrote a book, The Bible of SEO, his name was Aaron Wall, and so I read it. It was a very thick book, and from there, I’ve just been a vigorous student of SEO. I go all over the country, I speak on the subject. I built a digital marketing agency called EverSpark Interactive. Sold my interest in that last year to move to California. My son’s an actor out here, he’s 11 years old, and so helping him pursue his dreams, just doing consulting on the side and working very closely with Alex on working with attorneys, because that’s kind of been my experience over the years. So I love it. I’m passionate about it, probably as you are passionate about what you guys do with practicing law, and can’t get enough of it.

Alex Valencia:

Awesome. Thank you, and yeah, the Overture, I knew we’d get some hands raised, and Dan Weeks, I knew that was going to be you for sure.

Jason Hennessy:

Is Dan Weeks on the call?

Alex Valencia:

He’s on the call, man.

Jason Hennessy:

Dan, how are you, buddy?

Alex Valencia:

He’s a student. He’s awesome. He’s pretty awesome.

Jason Hennessy:

Dan is living in the happiest place in the world, right? He lives in California. St. Louis Ebispo, if I’m not misspoken, I think. Yeah, that’s hilarious. Hey, Dan. So…

Alex Valencia:

All right. Let’s jump on.

Jason Hennessy:

Perfect. All right, so great. So this topic today is called the truth about the legal directories, how to measure effectiveness of legal directories and help justify the cost. Perfect. Okay.

All right, so let’s kind of get started. So the term that I’m going to use here is I’m going to assume that I’m a personal injury lawyer and I live in Seattle, and so I’m just going to pretend that I am a new attorney in Seattle, I just created a website, and I want to be able to market my website, and I’m starting to get phone calls now. There’s a guy that called me yesterday from AVVO. There’s another guy that called me from Justia, the guy’s knocking at my door from FindLaw. There’s another directory called hg.org, right? I’m just kind of taking this all in. Everybody wants some of my money that I haven’t even made yet.

So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to be smart about it. So I just go to Google, and I type in “Seattle personal injury lawyer”. All right, so the first thing that I want to see, and if you see here, you’ll notice that I took out, I stripped out the 3-Pack, which is the Google Local, and I also stripped out the pay-per-click, just so that we can actually see the top ten results that are ranking in the organic positions.

So what I notice here is I noticed that AVVO.com is the number one organic listing. Then I see that there’s a competitor of mine, injurytriallawyer.com, number two. I see that FindLaw’s ranking number three, there’s another competitor ranking number four and five. I see that there’s a Yelp listing in number six position, Thumbtack, and then all the way at the bottom, it looks like Lawyers.com.

So right away, I can see here that directories account for about 50% of the real estate that’s on Google. So that’s just interesting to me, and I’ll just kind of make that kind of a side note.

So the thing that you have to realize now, this is me talking from an experienced SEO and not the attorney, is if Google is deeming that AVVO.com is the most relevant and the most popular listing to the term “Seattle personal injury lawyer”, that’s a signal that you’ve got to pay close attention to because they are putting them number one for that position for a reason. They are deeming that the most relevant and qualified result for somebody doing that search.

So me, as a personal injury lawyer, thinks to myself that I should probably associate my site with the most relevant and the most popular result that Google is displaying. So that right there is a signal that I’m listening to that says, “You know what? I should probably pay close attention to that, and I should probably think about advertising on that result.” In fact, I should probably think about advertising on all of the results that are showing up here on the first page, maybe even the first three pages of Google, but again, I have to consider the cost associated with this too.

So when I call up AVVO, I’m not going to worry about being listed in every single page, in every single section, in every single practice area. Specifically, I only want to be listed on this page, because this is the page that I’m going to get the most value from, because what happens is when Google sees that you are associated through this website by way of a link, because I know that AVVO does give free listings on their platform, but I don’t believe that the free listings will actually link back to your website, and that’s really where the value comes in. Not to mention, they do rank on the first page. So within their algorithm and the way that they shuffle things around, you probably will get some phone calls and some business as a result of that. That is the direct benefit of being listed with AVVO, but here, I think the indirect benefit has so much more value and the indirect benefit is the SEO benefit that you’re going to gain by being listed on that page that, again, Google deems as the most relevant and the most trustworthy result for this particular term, per “Seattle personal injury lawyer”.

All right, so I just kind of highlighted the ones that we just talked about here. This is the result itself. So I can see specifically here that there’s a guy, his name is Aaron Engel. He’s obviously advertising with AVVO. Right. There is that link. That’s the gold that I’m talking about. If I was Aaron, maybe I would want to be listed on maybe the car accident page. Maybe if there’s a boating accident page. I’m not sure. I would want to study every single page that they’re trying to sell me before I make that decision, and I’m going to share with you the tools needed to do so, but in this case right now, I know that this particular page, if we’re looking at the URL, AVVO.com, “Personal injury lawyer, WA, Seattle,” is definitely a page that I want to be on.

So just when you click on it, it’s going to go to their website there. So what’s happening is from there, there is a thing that’s called link equity, or some people call it link juice, some people call it page rank. There’s so many different terms within the industry, but the link equity is going to be passed when I click on that website button and it takes me to their page. So all that stuff is flowing through.

So now there’s some of you that might say, “Well, you know what? I’ve kind of been doing SEO for a while, and I know that there’s a difference between a follow link and a nofollow link, and what happens if this link is a nofollow link? Do I still get link equity?”, and the question is no, you won’t get page rank.

So the value is you won’t get page rank that’s passed, but there is still a thing that’s called trust rank, and so not a lot of SEOs talk about that, but there is value even though you’re not getting page rank that’s passed through, if this particular link is a nofollow link. So for those of you that are new to this, basically there’s two different types of links that you can get. You can get a follow link and then you can get a nofollow link, and so if one link, the follow link basically passes page rank, the other link, and some people, some websites want to preserve page ranks, so they say that they don’t want to follow links, but even if the link is a nofollow link, you still get trust value, trust rank that’s being passed, and there is value there in the organic results.

Probably some confusion there. If you do have confusion like that… I’m going to talk about this in a bit. We’re happy to do a free soft audit of your website. You can ask as many personal questions that you have about this, and you can reach out to Alex and I after this webinar to set up maybe a private one-on-one where we can talk about your specific cases.

All right, so right here, what I’m doing right now is this website right here, it’s Nelson, Blair, Langer and Engle. Right now, what I’m doing is I’m looking at their virtual currency. So this is just a third party tool that I use to reverse engineer how their website is performing on the search engines, and which links that they have that are the most valuable links, and so by using this tool here, I can see that yellowpages.com, right there in the number one position, that is their most valuable link. That right there, this tool has its own page rank, they call domain rank, and so this goes from zero to a hundred, with zero being the worst, 100 being the highest. So yellowpages.com has a domain rank of 73, because they’re listed on yellowpages.com. They’re getting domain rank or page rank that’s being passed from their website to our website, and so right there, that is their most valuable link.

Their second most valuable link is coming from AVVO, and so we just talked about that. As I go down the list here, I can see that Superlawyers.com is on there, Lawyer.com is on there. Looks like they’ve done some press releases, right? Lawyer Central, that’s one that I haven’t really paid close attention to. I might want to look at that and see, is that link valuable?

So anyway, this is just one of the first things that I would do, being a savvy SEO, to reverse engineer my competitors to see which directories they have that’s actually passing the most value, because if I’m a competitor and I want to compete with this firm in Seattle, I’m probably going to get listed on Lawyer.com and AVVO.com, and I might contact Lawyer Central, even though they haven’t contacted me yet, to get pricing on this kind of stuff, but again, I’m not going to be listed. I’m not going to be sold $5,000 to be on every page in AVVO for every practice area in Seattle. I’m going to selectively choose the pages that I want to be on so that I’m only paying them maybe $500 a month or a thousand dollars a month, because that investment, even though that I might not get a lot of cases by way of people calling me from the AVVO listing, just the association that I’m going to get by way of a link is having that indirect SEO benefit that will increase my rankings, which I’m really going to make most of my money from.

So specifically, if I want to even peeled the onion back a little bit further, I can see that the strongest link that they have from AVVO is that Seattle page that we’re talking about here. So here I can also see that they’re listed under litigation, they’re listed under insurance, employee benefits. That’s all fine and good, but specifically, I’m trying to rank for “Seattle personal injury lawyer,” and so therefore, that’s just one of the places that I feel I should be listed on.

All right, so that’s that. So now this is actually where it gets really cool. So now this right here, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to further investigate this page too. I already know that there’s going to be an indirect benefit of being listed on this page. Let’s see how the direct benefit will be. Will I actually get business from this page?

So I’m going to grab this URL here, this whole URL, and then I’m going to put it in a tool. Okay? So the name of this tool, if you want to jot this down, is called SEMRushtool.com. Jot that down, if there’s one investment that you make for SEO, let it be this one. You could pay for a year in advance, I think you save some money for this, or you can pay on a month to month basis, but this is probably one of the best investments that you can make if you’re looking to an invest in an SEO tool, and let me share with you why.

So I talked about, I grabbed that URL, I put it into this tool, and then basically, within just a few moments, it’s going to spit back some data that’s important to me. It’s going to tell me specifically, which keywords on Google does this specific page rank for? Where does this page rank for which position it is? So here’s the keyword, I’ll walk you through this.

So this keyword right here, “Seattle personal injury lawyer”, which is the term that I typed in on Google, and I found them in the first position, I can tell that 390 people are searching for that every month, and this comes directly from Google. They’re pulling this data from Google. I can see here that 390 people are searching for it. I can see the average cost per click. So if I were to actually build a pay-per-click campaign, I would have to pay $73 and 16 cents every time somebody clicked on that if that was a pay-per-click campaign, but I could also see that they also ranked for “Seattle personal injury attorney”, they ranked for “Seattle personal injury lawyers”, “personal injury attorney, Seattle”. There’s so many of these keywords that are important to me where they rank organically in the number one position.

So not only will I get the indirect benefit, but it looks like I actually will get some direct benefit here, direct benefit being that I might get some phone calls, right? This might be a place that I maybe even do a more authoritative advertisement with them. Maybe I feature myself in the top position of this page, because I can see specifically that I’m going to get business, because they’re ranking very well. In fact, I can actually see if I wanted to get the same traffic that AVVO is getting by way of a pay-per-click campaign, I would have to pay Google $42,000 per month to get the same traffic that this page on AVVO gets every month by the positions that they rank for these keywords and the traffic that they get. So that right there is a pretty big number. So to pay AVVO a thousand dollars a month to get $42,000 worth of eyeballs, that makes a lot of sense to me. What about you, Alex?

Alex Valencia:

Oh, for sure. I was hoping you would touch on the value a little bit, because it’s one of the things that we go through in the soft audit, is analyzing your SEMRush traffic costs and your competitors. So there’s tons of value with this page. Thumbs up on that one for sure. I just love this. This is so far going very well.

Jason Hennessy:

Absolutely, and yeah, same thing like Alex said, you can take your own website and put it into SEMRushtool.com, and the same thing, it will actually pull up your value and the keywords that your website brings forth, and this is actually a metric that you can use to start to monitor the progress that your SEO is making on your behalf. So obviously, if they’re doing a pretty good job, this number should be growing, right? You shouldn’t have a website. If you’re paying $5,000 a month to an SEO agency, and you look at your traffic cost and it’s like $39, well, you probably might want to start looking for a new SEO agency, because it doesn’t seem like they’re doing a good job.

Alex Valencia:

Mark Carlson, you had a question? Are you referring to the AVVO page cost or value, or are you asking what the cost to sign up for SEMRush is? SEMRush is $69 a month, roughly $69, $99, something like that where you can pay annually. They have different pro levels, but I think unless you’re monitoring your monthly, you don’t have to go to the pro.

Jason Hennessy:

I can’t see the questions, Alex, so I’m not sure if you have to share that with me, but it’s fine that you’re kind of reading them off. So I’ll let you know that.

All right, so we’ll move on. So basically, I took a screenshot here of the first page, but then I also took a screenshot, if I were to scroll down on this… There’s a lot more keywords that they rank in the number one through ten positions on Google. I can see here “personal injury lawyer in Seattle”, they look like they rank number one. There’s 20 people searching for that every month. The average cost per click is $102 per click, and then I would just spot check some of these. Obviously, this tool is not always 100% accurate, so I would just manually take a note to spot check some of these too, just to see if maybe they’re not in a number one position, well, maybe if they’re in the number three position, it’s still valuable. So I just spot checked that one keyword, and they are, in fact, in the number one position for that one.

So the reason why AVVO is in the number one position for a lot of these terms is because it’s a little trick that they do. Some say that it might not be the most ethical thing that they’re doing, but it is a trick that they do. So you know how they give out those AVVO awards? You rate it number ten, or you rate it number nine? That’s fine and dandy. Yeah, you do have your AVVO rating, but I think that was more of a savvy SEO play, because what happens is when they give you that code to embed on your website, it creates back links that are being pointed back to AVVO, and so therefore, that’s the reason why AVVO ranks so well, is because they have thousands upon thousands of lawyers that they’ve rated that they say, “Hey, you’re an eight rating, or you’re a ten rating. Here, put this badge on your website.”

So that right there, they give you the embed code, you put it on there, and of course, that embed code is linking back to AVVO.com, and so that’s why AVVO is killing it, is because they’re pretty savvy with the SEO, and kudos to Conrad back in the day.

Alex Valencia:

Oh yeah.

Jason Hennessy:

All right. So again, for those that are watching, SEMRushtool.com, that is the tool that we’re using here.

All right, moving on. All right, so now I’m just kind of going down the list here too. So now I’ll go to FindLaw.com. That one’s ranking number three on Google. I’m going to do the same thing. I’m just going to take that tool in there. I’m going to pop it in there, press submit. So it tells me that the traffic value of $10,000 per month, they don’t rank number one for all of the keywords, but they’re still within the top three possessions on Google for most of the terms that are important to me.

So if I want to get more brand exposure, this might be a good place to advertise as well. Again, I’m not going to pay FindLaw $5,000 a month to be on every single practice area in Seattle, but I’m going to selectively choose the pages that I want to be associated with, and I’m going to send them a list of them and say, “Hey, listen, this one has a $10,000 value, and I want to know how much is it going to be cost to be listed on this page? I want to know how much is it going to be cost to be listed on this page, but also, what is the advertising opportunity if I want to do a sponsored result where I’m hiring the page too?”, because I see that there’s value there.

So if you’re getting $10,000 worth of eyeballs, pay-per-click eyeballs to this page, I want to be featured prominently on the top of the page, whereas if I were to pull a FindLaw link that is for social security disability that might not be ranking as well, maybe I don’t care about being on that page as much, or if you want to throw that one in for 50 bucks a month, I’ll take it, and that’s also another important note to make, is when you start to advertise with these, make sure that every listing is not linking back to your homepage. So if you’re featured on the car accident page of FindLaw, make sure that it’s linking back to the car accident page on your website that’s targeting “Seattle car accident lawyer”.

Alex Valencia:

I see that all the time, where it’s all going to the homepage.

Jason Hennessy:

That’s bad, because you all pass page rank to the specific pages that are being optimized for the keywords that you’re trying to target, because you don’t want your homepage to rank for everything, and that just doesn’t look natural. So you want to selectively choose the practice areas that you’re going to target, that you’re going to advertise with on FindLaw, and you want them to link to social security page, because just from a conversion standpoint too, a usability standpoint, somebody is looking for a social security disability lawyer, and they find you on FindLaw and they click on your page, and it takes you to your homepage talking about car accidents, what is that doing? It’s creating a bad user experience for them. They want to talk specifically about how you can help them with filing a social security disability claim. So that’s an important note to make here.

The other important note to make, too, is oftentimes, these directories will say, “Hey, why don’t you use call tracking? We offer it. It’s an extra 50 bucks a month. It’s great, because you can actually see how many calls that you’re getting.” You absolutely never want to do that. Never, never, never, and the reason for that… Okay, you need to listen very closely about this, is because what’s happening is when they put a call tracking number on your page, your FindLaw advertisement on the listing that you have with them, they’re putting a number that’s going to be different from the phone number that’s on your website and your Google Plus listing, and so what happens is there’s a thing…

Now, if you want to rank within the 3-Pack the Google Local, well, how that works… And we could probably do a whole nother webinar talking specifically about Google Local, but I’m just going to make an important note here is, what happens is Google Local, the algorithm specifically looks at a term called “NAP,” your name, address and phone number, they refer to it as NAP. So Google is looking specifically at your name, address, and phone number on the profile that you created with Google. So your Google Plus my business profile, that’s the most important place that you want to make sure that your name, address and phone number are accurate, and so the way in which you write that name, address and phone number on your Google Plus local profile, your business profile, has to be the same on your website. So that’s the most important thing.

So if you use Suite and you spell out Suite on your Google Plus my local business page, well, make sure you write out suite on your homepage of your website too, or your contact page. Don’t just put pound sign or what have you. It has to be identical, okay? Same thing with your phone number. If you put parenthesis around the area code, make sure you do that on your homepage. It has to be accurate.

So what I’m saying is Google’s now going to crawl the web and look for a consistency with your name, address and phone number on every single place that you have a listing, and so if they go out and they crawl and they see that you’re associated with this FindLaw page, and that you have a listing and a link that links back to your website, well, you’re going to get the SEO value from the link pointing back to your website, but if they recognize that you have a different phone number, because you’re using this call tracking number on the FindLaw page, well, that’s going to be an inaccuracy of your NAP, right? It’s going to tell a signal that the phone number is not the same over here, and so you’re not going to get benefits from that. In fact, you’re actually going to get discredited. You’re going to lose points within the Google Local listing.

So moral of the story is don’t do call tracking within these listings, and then that brings up a whole nother question. “Well, I do call tracking on my website. Is that bad?”, and if you’re using JavaScript, most call tracking platforms that I’m aware of, they use JavaScript, and so Google will still see the code and the phone number that is supposed to be on your website, so they’ll look at the number, but what happens is they use JavaScript to swap it out so that on the front end of the website, it’s a different number to the user, but Google still sees your main number.

So I went off on a tangent there, but I wanted to, because it’s so important.

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, we’ll do a Google Local webinar.

Jason Hennessy:

Okay. All right. So just kind of moving down the page here, now I’m looking at Yelp. Yelp has a $5,000 value per month. They’re still within the top ten positions on Google. Not as much value as the AVVO listing, not as much value as the FindLaw listing, but hey, I might pay Yelp $300 a month to be listed on this specific page, because I can see that there’s going to be an indirect SEO benefit by being associated with this page. So I might consider that advertisement.

If Yelp came back to me and said, “Hey, listen, we want to give you $4,500 advertisement with Yelp,” yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, if you think that your customers are using Yelp and not finding you by way of a search engine, well, hey, maybe there’s value there, maybe you could do that, but I don’t look at Yelp when I’m looking for a personal injury lawyer. I go right to Google. I use Yelp if I’m looking for a restaurant, I want to see reviews, but that’s just me.

I’ll talk a little bit more about how you can test it, and then measure the effectiveness. So let’s just say you say, “All right, I’ll try this out for a month for $4,000 a month. You sold me,” but I want it to just be month to month for the first three months just so they can see it, and I’m going to share with you later in this webinar how you can actually measure the effectiveness of that particular campaign.

All right, and then I think I just grabbed Lawyers.com as the last one here. $2,800 per month in value. Again, they ranked for 45 keywords, this page, still on the first page of Google. I might give them 600 bucks a year or a thousand dollars a year, but I’m not going to pony up 3,500 bucks a month to be listed here.

You kind of have to think about it that way. Is everybody getting value from this? Maybe just kind of leave a little comment or question. I just want to make sure, because trying to get you guys to think about this from a whole different brain level, rather than just getting on the phone with the salesman and them just pitching you. So I hope you’re getting value from it.

All right, and then what I’ve done here now is I went all the way to page six, because I wanted to share with you, that was the first page of Google. Those are the ones that are most valuable, but I went to page six of Google for “Seattle personal injury lawyer”, and I found this directory here, the Justia directory, and so I did the same exercise here, and the value is $62 per month, and I could see that they rank in position 57, so that’s page six of Google for that term. They rank on page three of Google for “personal injury attorney in Seattle”. They rank almost on page eight of or nine of Google for “Seattle truck accident lawyer”.

Right there, I know that I’m not going to get the direct benefit. People aren’t going to see me from Justia and link to my website and call me. I’m not going to get a whole lot of indirect benefit. Maybe I will. I’m still questionable about that.

So what I’ve done here is now it’s time to reverse engineer some of the competitors to see, well, is Justia actually… Is there a lot of indirect benefit by being associated with that? What’s the domain rating, which we talked about earlier, of Justia? Right? Well, if the domain rating is higher, maybe that lends itself to advertise with them, because there might be an indirect benefit, SEO benefit, of being associated to justia.

So what I’m going to do right now is I’m going to go to Google, I’m going to type in “Seattle personal injury lawyer”, and I see that the number one listing for both the local and the organic is this firm right here. It’s Davis Law Group, right? Injurytriallawyer.com. So using my tools, I’m going to see where they rank. So this is SEMRushtool.com. I just basically did the same thing, except I’m actually just using now on a competitor’s website. I told you this is going to be your go-to tool from now on. So a good investment, SEMRushtool.com. I probably spend 30% of my time all day, and I’m an advanced SEO on this tool, and I know, Alex, you probably spend a lot of time on this tool too.

Alex Valencia:

I do. Our staff does too. Yeah.

Jason Hennessy:

So right here, I see that this law firm ranks for all these keywords. Great. They ranked number one for “Seattle car accident lawyers”, “Seattle train accident”, “Seattle personal injury law firm”. I see that this is a competitor that I want to pay close attention to from a digital perspective. They might not be doing the billboards and everything else, but from a digital perspective, that’s how I’m going to be competing in the market.

So by reverse engineering their links, I can see that YouTube is their strongest link. I can see that they have a Google Plus profile, so that’s set up correctly. I can see that they’re advertising on Pinterest, or they’ve got a Pinterest page. I can see that they actually have a Wikipedia profile set up, which is kind of valuable. I go through this list here to see, where are they getting their popularity from? Better Business Bureau. Talk about indirect benefit. I know that most people know that they’re not going to get business by having a Better Business Bureau profile. Nobody goes to Better Business Bureau to get a personal injury lawyer. They might go there to see if you’re actually competent and trustworthy, but just by having a Better Business Bureau profile, I’m going to get an 82 domain rank linking back to me, which is going to have an indirect SEO benefit, and that’s a dofollow link.

You see how that’s a dofollow or nofollow? So I’ll get both trust value and I will get link equity passed from that link, and this is where we spend most of our time as SEOs, is by reverse engineering the competitors and their link strategies and starting to build out a link strategy that’s going to be effective, but you can kind of see how we’re using it to understand advertising opportunities right now.

So now if I scroll down a little bit further here, I can see that they’re on Yellow Pages, they’re on AVVO, Super Lawyers, Justia. Okay, great, this is the one that we want to talk about. They’re not going to get a lot of traffic because they’re on page six of Google for the term that’s important to me. However, the domain rating is 69, and that’s probably one of their top 20 links. So I do want to be associated with that website in some capacity.

The question is, in my mind, how valuable is that link? So I would probably say that right there, in my mind, I probably would be willing to pay maybe 200 bucks a month for that, maybe, just for the indirect benefit of being associated with that Justia website, the profile. So 2,400 bucks a year. It might be a lot cheaper than that. I don’t know the cost of that. That might only be 500 bucks a year to advertise it, and if that’s the case, then that’s a steal, but again…

Alex Valencia:

You’re going to SEO rank value, you’re putting a number on it based on if you… Doing the SEO, what you think would be the value. The cost might be different based on the directory, and someone asked a question on FindLaw and Lawyers.com, what would you pay? I don’t know that we know the pricing, but what’s the value to us as an SEO agency?

Jason Hennessy:

Everything is all… That’s why I said call us. Schedule a one-on-one with us, where we can review this stuff and we can answer your questions. Everything is all dependent. In this case, I’m using “Seattle personal injury lawyer”. It’s not the same. Every keyword is different. If you are an attorney that works on employment law, and you are in Oklahoma, that’s going to be a lot different than this. So everything is very… When I say everything, I mean the cost, the cost that I’m going to put in my mind and how much I’m going to advertise with that, because I know that I’m probably not going to get a lot of traffic to my website by being listed on Justia, because I know that that page doesn’t get a lot of traffic.

So I know in my mind, I’m not going to get a lot of traffic, which means I’m probably not going to get a lot of cases and phone calls by being listed on this. Occasionally, people might use the lawyer, Justia lawyer directory to find me, maybe another attorney might find me and refer me a case. There might be some direct benefit, but in my mind, I’m putting that $2,400 value on how it’s going to improve my Google results when I do a search for “Seattle personal injury lawyer”, and so in my mind, that $2,400 is well spent, and I don’t care that Justia doesn’t send me any traffic to my website, and I don’t care that I don’t get any cases from Justia, but it’s helping me rank in the third position on Google for “Seattle personal injury lawyer”, and I don’t want to lose that, and I know that because I’ve just seen right here that the competitor that’s ranking number one for most of the terms that are important to me, that’s one of his top 20 links. So that’s how I’m able to see that.

All right, so moving back over, and we’re almost done here. What time are we at Alex, right now? I know we’re going to leave some time for this…

Alex Valencia:

1:48. We might be running a little late. Hopefully everyone can stay on.

Jason Hennessy:

All right, so I’ll try to move a little faster here. So the thing here that I want to talk about now is, let’s just say that you gave… What was the one that we were talking about earlier? I think we were talking about FindLaw. We said, “All right, let’s try it out. I’ll give you 3,500 bucks a month,” because I think there is going to be some direct benefit, and I think that there’s going to be a lot of indirect benefit, but let’s measure the direct benefit.

So after three months, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to go to my Google Analytics, which everybody on this webinar should have. If you don’t, make that as an action item that you take care of today. Tell your webmaster, “Hey, what’s my Google Analytics?”, and make sure that’s an action item that you take care of today. So once you log into your Google Analytics, this is all great data here, but the button that I want you to pay close attention to is this “acquisition” button. So click on the “acquisition” button.

The next thing that you’re going to see is you’re going to see “overview,” and when you see “overview,” you’re going to click on “referral,” and so once you click on “referral,” then you can start to… There’s a little search feature here. You can put in AVVO, right? Because you know that you’re listing on AVVO and you’re getting traffic by way of AVVO. All right, so I’m paying AVVO. Here’s where this gets really interesting.

So if you’re paying AVVO four grand a month, and I know that they have rotation and you’re paying for the rotation and there’s more impressions that you get, the more money you spend with them, and all this other stuff, I know that they’ve changed their business model so many times, but if I’m paying them 3,500 bucks a month to have my website listed in the rotation more than other people, I can see specifically here that in the past 30 days, I only got six clicks back to my website, and I can see specifically on which days.

So if I’m paying them $3,500 a month to be in the rotation more, because I think I’m going to get a lot of direct benefit, SEO benefit, by way of phone calls, leads and cases, I’m not. Here’s the facts. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to call them back, and I’m going to say, “Hey, listen, I appreciate it. I still like the AVVO directory, and I like what you guys are doing, but it doesn’t seem like I’m getting that much direct benefit. I really care more about the indirect benefit of being listed on this page. So why don’t you kind of scale back the amount of impressions that I get featured and whatnot, and why don’t you just basically just kind of keep me on that page, and I’ll give you guys 300 bucks a month.” All right, deal, done.

So now you’re paying for the indirect benefit, but here’s the proof, is that you’re not getting the clicks. Now, phone calls might be different, I’m not sure, but if you’re only getting six clicks, I’d imagine that you’re probably only getting a couple phone calls from that too, and that’s basically how you’re able to measure the direct benefit of being listed on these pages.

Alex Valencia:

Can you repeat the path you got there again, for one of our viewers?

Jason Hennessy:

When you go to your analytics, this is the page that you’ll see, this is the default page. On the left hand side, you’ve got all these options. You’re going to click “acquisition” first. Once you click “acquisition,” you’re going to see an “overview” that you might have to open, and then once you click on that, it’ll start to show this stuff right here. So you’ll click on “overview,” and then you’ll see your organic search results, your direct and your referral. If you click on “referral,” it’ll list out, by default, all of the places that you get referring traffic, but then you can start to use the search feature to tune in. So in this case, I used AVVO. This case right here, I used FindLaw.

So FindLaw looks like they’re sending me more traffic than AVVO, which is surprising, because I know AVVO ranks better than FindLaw for the terms that are important to me. So this tells me that more people are using FindLaw directory to find my website because that’s the proof here, is I’m getting 38 visits from FindLaw when I’m only getting six visits from AVVO, and so maybe you’re getting more, but when a FindLaw rep calls you up and says, “Hey man, you’ve been getting 500 views from our listing, 500 clicks to your website from our listing,” you can say, “Well, not really. Let’s schedule a webinar. Let me share this with you.” Here’s the proof that you basically paid them 3,500 bucks for 38 clicks, and what’s the math on that? 1% typically will convert into an action, like a phone call or something, so it doesn’t seem that that might not be the best use of your money. However, to be featured on that page, maybe at the bottom of the page somewhere, maybe that might be a better investment for a couple hundred bucks a month.

This is another one right here. This is up at the top here. This is Lawyers.com. Looks like ten, and you can see specifically, I wanted to show you this, because if you’re listed on multiple pages within the site, it’ll show you specifically those pages that you’re getting traffic to too. So I can see that “Boating accidents” only got one click. “DUI, DWI accidents” only got one click. So at the end of the year, if I look at all this and I’m going up for my renewal, I’ll say, “Well, the boating accident page didn’t really do that well. So we can probably get rid of that one and this one,” but at the same time, though, before you do that, you want to go and do a search for “Seattle boating accident lawyer”, and if FindLaw is ranking on the first page and their value is $40,000 a month, then you might want to still stay on that page just for that indirect benefit.

Alex Valencia:

We have a couple questions here. I’m going to jump in real quick.

Jason Hennessy:

Let me just wrap up, Alex, and then I’m done here. So this is Justia, same thing, but basically, I want to wrap up with, if we do these, we literally do four of these a day, if you would like us to do a free SEO audit of your website, you can reach out to me. Here’s my contact information. More importantly, you can reach out to Alex. Here’s his contact information. It’s free. The only thing that you have to invest is about 45 minutes of your time, and we’ll kind of talk about everything, and you can ask specific questions to us. All right, so let’s go to the questions now.

Alex Valencia:

All right, so Dan, we have, “Does the indirect SEO benefit from directories like AVVO come independent if you are on the first page on AVVO for the term, i.e. free listing, have a great value for indirect, even if you are ten pages down for Seattle personal injury lawyer?”

Jason Hennessy:

Okay, so that’s a good question. So I would have to look at that. So if you have a free listing with AVVO, I don’t think they give you a link to your website. I could be mistaken, but I don’t know why they would do that. So that’s my first point, but I think you have to pay for a listing for them to give you a link back to your website. So immediately, that’s my first point.

The second thing that I will say there is… So I’m not sure how AVVO is set up, because typically, there’s a way that you can actually put… It’s called “schema markup code,” that will basically tell Google that… There’s a thing within the code called rel equals next and rel equals prev, and so those are tags that you put on your page. So if there’s 15 pages on FindLaw, basically it would tell Google that even though that there’s 15 pages, this is really one long page, and so treat all 15 pages as though this was the one long page, but I would have to specifically look at FindLaw’s code to be able to determine that, and that would take a little bit of time.

So I would assume that they’re savvy enough to set it up that way, but again, I’m not sure, and if that’s not the case and you’re on page three or four or ten of their profile, then there might not be the same indirect benefit. So I hope that answers your question.

Alex Valencia:

Dan, let me know if it does or not. We had another one from Mark, and Mark, I think this is relevant to the area and the research that we’re doing. It goes back to doing the audit, whether or not we prefer FindLaw or the lawyers. We did just one search on this, on one specific area, so in your market, we don’t know, Lawyers.com might be better than FindLaw, AVVO, it comes down, right? Jason? You can’t tell which one’s going to be better for SEO.

Jason Hennessy:

Everything is custom. That’s why I wanted to give you guys the knowledge to go out and do this in your own markets, and I wanted to give you the tools necessary to do so, and so SEMRushtool.com is the tool that I talked about, and then Google Analytics is the tool that I also shared. So just using those two tools now with the knowledge that we gave, you can kind of go and start to make this determination for yourself, or, like I said, schedule a free SEO audit, and we can talk about this kind of stuff.

Alex Valencia:

Then we had a question. So John, I think we answered your question. If you’re watching, you saw some of the top legal directories that you can choose from, depending on what value they have, how to research them and see how you can get back the indirect SEO value for them.

Ed Lopez, “Question for you when you get the chance. What are the price differences between using FindLaw and Lexus for web development? Do FindLaw or Lexus also do SEO?” They do sell those services. I think the price range is… Do you know, Jason?

Jason Hennessy:

I don’t want to discourage anybody. However, just speaking from my own experience and working with clients where they have asked us to take them off of the FindLaw platform, which is a fact. There’s clients that are not happy with the services. When we start to go in and reverse engineer their link strategies, I don’t think FindLaw is actually doing what accounts for about 70% of SEO, what SEO is, and that’s the reverse engineering of the competitors and building links. They’re not necessarily doing that, and so what they’re doing is they’re basically doing the other 70% of writing content for you, and putting you within their directories and optimizing some of the page titles and hosting the website.

They’re doing 70% of the SEO. They’re doing 30% of what accounts of SEO, but the other 70%, they’re ignoring, just because they don’t have the staff or resources to do that, and that’s where you really want to get a more savvier SEO to go in and selectively, manually do that kind of stuff.

Alex Valencia:

Perfect, and then Dan said, perfect answer. Mark asked that we sum up our services. We’re a digital marketing agency. We do everything for the legal, from ads all the way down to content writing. We take a custom approach to you. As you can see, there’s a good amount of research that goes per client, whether it’s building out your link strategy, your content strategy, SEO strategy, ad buying strategy, it’s all custom to you, to your market. Reverse engineering is basically Jason’s way of doing it, Jason, if you want to jump in and add to it, but we’re all encompassing services when it comes to the digital marketing for law firms. Price range…

Jason Hennessy:

When you start to engage us to do your marketing… There’s an old joke, I might slaughter it here, but there’s a joke where a guy has a broken refrigerator, and he calls it the repairman, and the repairman comes over to the house and says, “Man, I’ve read everything. I’ve watched every YouTube video on this. I just can’t figure it out. All of a sudden, the icemaker stopped working.” So the repairman looks at the refrigerator, he goes, “Ah, okay. It looks like it’s a 2006 model. Okay, great.” He takes out a hammer and he knocks on the back. Bam, the ice machine starts working. He goes, “Okay, that’ll be $1,200.” “$1,200? All you did was knock on the back of the thing!” He goes, “I could have did that myself.” He goes, “Yeah, you could have, but you have to know exactly where to hit this point.”

You know what I mean? That’s what it comes down to. It’s the same thing with digital marketing. It’s like, everybody says that they can do it, and you think you can do it yourself, but really, when you start to engage us, you’re paying us for the 2001 when I was in the weeds reading all this SEO books and staying current with the algorithm and updates, from Penguin to Panda to mobile get into… You’re basically paying for our passion over the years and our vigorous studies of this subject, and I could tell you, for the most part, you’re probably not going to find a more savvier digital marketing team than us if we were to get engaged, and I would fear that your competitors would probably start to get a little nervous if we start to enter your markets.

So that’s all I’ll say, and we’re happy to kind of take a look. We’re not the cheapest company to work with, I’ll just kind of be off the bat, but getting results is not cheap. I’m flying out to Atlanta after my trip to New York, and I’m going to go meet with an attorney there that’s a client, he’s probably one of the biggest personal injury lawyers in Atlanta, and I’m going to go look at the new floor that they just got, because of the growth that they’ve had from their digital strategy, and that’s just a true story, and that’s kind of what it is that we do. We grow law firms.

Alex Valencia:

Awesome. Thank you, and then one… Well, actually two questions, one very funny. From Justin, “Is SEM recommended? What percentage should go to AdWords and what percentage to directories?” Again, it’s really custom. Jason, you want to take the rest of that?

Jason Hennessy:

Yeah, I would set up… AdWords. I’d be a little bit for… I know personal injury lawyers and car accident lawyers, those are very expensive keywords. There’s ways that you can be more savvy with AdWords and pay-per-click. I would probably set click to call campaigns only, and that’s a new… Well, not new, but it’s new, most people don’t know about it. So basically, that’s where people do a search for personal injury lawyer on their smartphone, and they see that there’s a personal injury lawyer ad there, which is very hard to miss, and now they just made the little links green, which is a little bit more prompting to click.

So rather than when you click on that with your thumb, it’s not going to go to your website, it’s going to ring your phone. So basically, in that case, you’re paying Google for calls and not clicks, and so I would probably set up a campaign that only does that, because you only convert about 1% of people that click on your website. So I would be a little bit more effective with your pay-per-click campaigns. Otherwise, you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every month just on waste for that kind of stuff, but if you have a budget and you want to go more long term, I think the organic SEO is the way to go, and so I’d probably allocate more to that, but if you need to just start getting phone calls today and you’re a new firm, pay-per-click is probably a good solution, because that’s the quickest way to kind of enter a market.

Alex Valencia:

Awesome. Perfect. Perfect answer. Thank you, and Carolyn, I am going to say that Jason is the best. He’s a student at this. I’m happy to be working with him, with our agency. We started off as a content agency in 2008, but again, you can’t survive on content alone. Google or… Mack Hutz has said you can, but why try? There’s so much value with optimization and SEO. It’s so complex. You need guys like Jason and his SEO team that is actually going in there, diving, reverse engineering, learning all this for us, because I’ve been reading it, but I’m not an implementer. I know as much as I can and as much as I want to know, and I know I don’t want to implement it. I’m not that guy. Jason is the guy. He is absolutely awesome. So to answer your question…

Jason Hennessy:

What was the question?

Alex Valencia:

For sure. Which of the two of you is the best?

Jason Hennessy:

No, Alex is a… Obviously he built a very strong content team. He thoroughly understands the content process, and it’s not easy writing legal content. Everybody on this call knows that, and he’s been doing it for years, years on end, him and his wife Yvette, and so they’re very good at it. So together, we thought it was the perfect match. So…

Alex Valencia:

Well, thank you guys. Thank you, Jason. This was another great webinar. Thank you so much. Again, stoked to have you on our team and working with us. Let us know about the free SEO audits. You’re going to be getting emails pretty shortly inviting you to set up some time to do an audit. Like I said, we try to book these four, four or five a day. Four’s kind of maxed out, but we’ll do it. We have two after here.

Jason Hennessy:

We do.

Alex Valencia:

So actually, we have two right after the webinar.

Jason Hennessy:

Now’s the time where everybody’s breaking out their emails and looking for their FindLaw rep and their AVVO rep, and…

Alex Valencia:

I know there’s a couple conversations happening tomorrow on that.

Jason Hennessy:

Don’t mention my name. Don’t mention our names.

Alex Valencia:

No, definitely not. Again, thank you. So the next webinar, we’ll probably be doing on Google Local. We’re also going to be doing one with Infusionsoft. Again, that’s another one of the elements that we add, is once we’re driving enough traffic to a website, we are also doing the email automation sequences and helping you capture some of the leads that you may not have captured upfront. So again, we’re all encompassed agency. We’re trying to help and grow law firms and small businesses.

Thank you again for watching. You guys have a great weekend. We had a great number of people that attended and registered for this webinar. Please fill out the survey, and let us know what else you’d like to learn about.

Jason, have fun in New York, dude.

Jason Hennessy:

All right, bud. We’ll talk in a bit. We got those two webinars.

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, I’ll talk to you in a little bit.

Jason Hennessy:

All right, thanks buddy.

Alex Valencia:

Have a great one, guys. Thank you so much.

Narrator:

Thanks so much for listening to SEO Happy Hour with We Do Web Content. For more great content and to stamp to date, go to wedowebcontent.com and we’ll catch you next time.