Breaking the Growth Plateau: Digital Marketing for PI Law Firms with Leann Pickard

Is SEO Dead? What PI Firms Must Know in 2025!

In this episode of The Lawyer Mastermind Podcast, Casey Meraz and Leann Pickard dive into innovative strategies to break past growth plateaus. From SEO and PPC to AI’s impact on LSAs, we explore proven tactics to generate more high-value cases. Watch now to unlock new growth opportunities!

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⏱ Chapters:
00:00 – Intro & Episode Overview
Meet Casey Mraz & Leanne Pickard and preview today’s discussion on digital marketing for PI firms.

02:15 – Is SEO Dead? The Truth About AI & Rankings
Breaking the myth: Why SEO still matters and how AI is changing the legal marketing landscape.

06:40 – Winning Strategy: SEO + PPC + LSAs
How combining SEO, Google Ads, and Local Service Ads accelerates case acquisition.

12:30 – Accident Blogging: A High-ROI SEO Tactic
How firms use real-time accident blogs to generate case leads fast.

18:10 – AI’s Role in Legal Marketing & LSAs
How AI is reshaping LSAs, lead disputes, and PPC performance for law firms.

26:45 – The Power of Being Everywhere: Multi-Channel Marketing
Why dominating search results across multiple platforms is key to PI firm success.

31:20 – Content Strategy: Quality vs. Quantity
Why firms should focus on impactful content rather than AI-generated volume.

38:50 – Tracking Metrics That Matter
How law firms can measure ROI, lead response time, and referral growth effectively.

44:15 – Scaling Up: Expanding to New Locations
How multi-location strategies help firms break through revenue ceilings.

49:30 – Final Thoughts & Next Steps
Key takeaways and how to implement these strategies in your firm.

#LegalMarketing #SEOForLawyers #PILawFirmGrowth #JurisDigital

Transcript

Casey

Sponsored by Juris Digital. Hello and welcome to the Lawyer Mastermind podcast. I'm your host, Casey Mraz, and today I'm joined with the COO of Juris Digital Leanne Picard. How are you doing today, Leanne?

Leann

I am doing pretty good.

Casey

Awesome.

Leann

It's cold outside.

Casey:

It is cold outside. We are currently in Denver, and there's snow all over the ground.

Leann

It was like one degree this morning, I can't even say in degrees, so one degree.

Casey

Yeah, it can't be plural because it's just one,

Leann

One, not negative, but

Casey

That's how you know it's too cold. And so next time, let's do this next podcast in Hawaii. Let's make that

Leann

Deal

Casey

A goal, but

Leann

Next week.

Casey

Next week, yeah. Okay. Well hopefully this takes off. That's what I'm going to

Leann

Say. Sounds good.

Casey

The title of today's episode is Breaking the Growth Plateau, and this is digital marketing for High Revenue PI firms. And what we want to do today is really just talk about how personal injury firms can overcome growth plateaus that they've faced. And it's 2025. There's all of this noise of SEO pay per click, Chachi pt if you're a nerd like me and you follow all of it. You hear about Deep Seek and Claude and Gemini and all this stuff. And today we're going to break that down. Let's just talk about it, what it all means.

Leann

Sounds good to

Casey

Me, and exactly how that's going to help law firms do what they want to do, which is get up from that plateau, grow their firm, and sign more of the cases that they want. So before I dive into my notes and look too much at this, Leanne, I think I want to start by talking about a strategy that we're seeing a lot of success with right now for our personal injury clients. And I just want to frame this because people are like, oh, SEO's dead. And how many times have you heard that over the years?

Leann

I would say more so recently. Even on the ads that I see on social media doesn't exist. SEO is dead. Use our AI tool instead.

Casey

That's true. And there's so many crappy AI tools out there, which I'm sure we'll dive into at some point during this hour. But yeah, I mean it's not true. And the reason I think is because, well, number one, strategy wise, what's the go-to strategy that you would say when you're talking to clients, if they come to you with saying, Hey, I want to sign more car accident cases, is there a strategy that they commonly come to you with or a need or desire they have?

Leann

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is either they're not, majority of the time not getting enough cases. I think our sweet spot of strategy would be running SEO and PPC LSAs together that seems to get the fastest, best results as SEO builds or we're doing things in the background. That's probably my go-to

Casey

For sure. Yeah, no, and that's definitely from a strategy perspective, very high level. But I think that's an inherent problem too, that most law firm owners don't really realize is that if there's 20 personal injury firms in San Diego, California, all 20 of them, all of those attorneys that I speak to every single time without a doubt will be like, I want to be number one for a car accident lawyer. And it's true, that's going to bring you cases, it's going to bring you case leads, but if everybody's doing that, not everybody can be number one.

Leann

Yeah, that's true.

Casey

And that's what I want to say. It's not just like you need to focus on these keywords that everybody's going after. There's strategies where you can get quicker results. What's the one that you guys were doing recently for Silva Injury Attorneys? The accident blogging.

Leann

Oh yeah. So instead of running basically PPC ads, we're doing the SEO things in the background. We've developed a way creating a specific site like a microsite where accident blogging is dedicated just to this area. Actually, Matt is better at explaining what that is. But essentially we are blogging on the previous accidents. I think that's how it goes, where there's an accident that happened or that it has happened recently or maybe a couple weeks before, and then we're posting about it and writing a blog and basically asking for their help or they're asking for our help. And then that's posted and then there's good and bad about it.

Casey

Of course, nothing is just all roses, right?

Leann

Yeah. So obviously you have to have a little bit of thick skin if you're going to run a campaign like that and be open to some of the outside of people not really responding or commenting on things that aren't correct. But as far as an SEO strategy, it really gets results in, we've seen clients sign 10, 20 cases in a couple of days from this sort of tactic

Casey

When done. And with anything SEO wise, it's nuanced. There's a shitty way to do it, an easy way that maybe you could use AI tools to spin out content, and that to be fair, might work for a month or a few weeks or whatever, but there's no long-term benefit to that. But the strategy that you guys have developed, or I guess we have developed is kind of accounts for all of that. And it's a long-term strategy, but I How's just like it's different, right? Yeah. We're still doing the same things that everybody else is doing and you should do those, but we have to do some other different things too, if you're serious about getting those results. I think one of the biggest frustrations that personal injuries, personal injury attorneys I speak with is like, Hey, look, I've already talked to 12 SEO companies and they all say I have to wait six months or a year to see anything. But like you said, you marry that strategy with ads. How fast do you start seeing results with ads like today, 2025, and maybe talk about LSAs and Google ads as well?

Leann

Sure. I would say marrying SEO with advertising, you're still looking for great results. You're going to start to see results right away as far as traction goes within the first couple of weeks, then it works itself out. So Google needs to adjust its ads, make sure it's credible, recognize those things. So that takes a good momentum over 4, 5, 6 weeks. But within two to three months, you're really looking at a good trail of lead volume. And while SEO is still working in the background, the leads, you're not paying for within three months, you're really, I would say, getting a good amount of volume of leads coming in the door. That doesn't work for everybody. Obviously every location, every firm's different, but ultimately, yeah, I would say two to three months, you're really starting to get results should be signing cases within three, four months of that.

Casey

And you said that everybody's like it doesn't work, click for everybody a hundred percent of the time. Are there market nuances? What do you attribute that to?

Leann

Yeah, I mean, I think location, so LA California is plethora with

Casey

Pay more,

Leann

All of those. Or if Morgan and Morgan, they're paying for specific ads, they do certain times where they boost different ad spends and they'll blow everybody out of the water with their budget. So we're not showing up in that top bracket of where we want to show up. However, that's where SEO really comes into fruition of where we're getting as much real estate as possible. So we really want to show up for the LSA, we want to show up for the PPC and the SEO. And if PPC is not really making that traction, we still have those other real estate options to get those and pulled the leads in. But

Casey

For sure,

Leann

I would say a big play. If you're in a Houston, Texas area, personal injury firms, it's going to be really competitive. You're going to be spending over a hundred K just to make it to be up there and compete. Well, really.

Casey

Yeah, and you brought up a lot of things that got my brain going in about 10 different directions, but the one that I wanted to just focus on is SEO is dead. SEO is kind of in the same sense that we've always approached it. You want to be in the most places normal. We know that one in three people start their journey looking for an attorney online. So someplace online. So that could be ads, it could be Google business profile, it could be organic results, it could be directories like Yelp. But we know that 75% of people turn on the online at some point in their journey when looking for an attorney. So what you're saying about being in multiple places just brings me to say, Hey, look, the strategy still is the same. It's be as many places as you can, especially if you have proper tracking set up and you say, Hey, look, 80% of my cases are coming from these channels and let's keep doing more of that. But if you did want to try new channels, yeah, you can do that, but you can put 20% of that spend or something towards that channel. You don't have to blow your marketing budget and say, Hey, look, we need to be on TikTok, Instagram and 10,000 things at once, because the reality is you won't do all those. Well,

Leann

Yeah, and I mean, I think saying SEO is dead is kind of, billboards are dead. It's like they're going to evolve. We don't do a lot of paper ones now. There's digital ones. You can put up ads faster, you get more money really for those ads versus just one for a certain amount of time. So I think it just evolves. Things evolve. They don't really die necessarily. And I think that's the misconception with AI coming to play as well. I think AI helps get to the work a little faster and it saves some time in certain areas, but still the human is the one coming up with the strategy and navigating things. It can't do it all. Maybe one day it will, but I think that's 50 years down the road,

Casey

Maybe like five, 10,

Leann

Maybe. I want to say 50, but let's take LSAs for example. I just had this kind of confirmed by another guy recently in a conversation. So Google navigating their AI platform and all that, you're starting to see PPC LSAs really navigated through ai. Those calls coming in. Now Google has set where LSAs, you used to be able to call and really refute a lot of those calls.

Now, you can't as much really, so you're not getting that money back. So AI being introduced into LSA and Google, if people aren't answering the phone call in three to five seconds and talking about what they Googled, sometimes you're still charged for those calls. So AI is dictating specifically what type of language you're putting into Google and talking about on the phone. So it's listening to that first call in three to five seconds. Is it relevant, is it not relevant? If it's not relevant, you can get your money back. If it is relevant or semi relevant, then you're probably not going to get your money back and they could call for a specific reason or whatever, but if we're not educating our clients on that first three to five seconds, if we're not even answering the phone call in three to five seconds, we're not getting any credit from that from LSAs.

Leann

And then we're also not able to get the refunds that we need. So we have to educate clients on how AI is working in the backend. We've seen a lot of LSA drop significantly since AI has come into play. So that's a big one I would say with, I've seen a lot on Twitter, ai o world, and the humanistic piece of making sure they're really working together.

Casey

Sure, yeah. It seems that there's a lot of uproar about the ls, a dispute process and all of that right now. And for those that don't know local services ads, that's a pay per lead model

Leann

It is.

Casey

And that differs from Google Ads. How?

Leann

Yeah, so pay per click, so PPC, Google ads, those are, you're paying for anybody that clicks on the ad, so anybody going there and clicking that ad, you're getting charged for it.

Casey

And there's really no recourse on that though, to be fair either.

Leann (12:33):

No, we have a lot of, in our business, our tools, we have tools that kind of stop. If there is spam that clicks, we have tools in place to stop those. But yeah, if you don't know about those tools or you're trying to run Google ads on your own, you're going to be losing a lot of money. A lot of bots out there,

Casey (12:48):

You're

Leann

Going to be clicking away.

Casey

They're there to take your money.

Leann

But local service ads, they were introduced I think what, 3, 2, 3 years ago. So they're a pay per lead model and they used to be able to dispute the ads, quick setup, low cost type scenario and pay for just the cases that you're going to basically sign. But there's been a lot of changes on Google side

Casey

And they've still had record profits. Shocking. Do you see any positive changes coming from that? I mean obviously as AI is refined, hopefully, but other, what's your kind of looking into the future, what do you see?

Leann

I mean hopefully they make it more beneficial for the client. I think right now it's just another probably real estate piece. I think it's important when you're doing SEO, I don't think one work well without the other, and that's maybe an unpopular opinion, but I think you get faster, better results in six months, nine months if you're running S-E-O-P-P-C altogether at the same time.

And we've seen success in that just by traction. It also just getting leads in the door faster while SEO picks up, then you can pull back on PPC not paying as much and then run SEOA little bit harder. So we've seen a lot of success in that. And I think with the changes of Google, it's really just hurting us. I think us meaning the clients, anybody who's running ads to get traction faster without spending as much money. So Google wants you to pay more, you do more, and they're going to run more ai. So I hope over the next couple years it kind of evens out of cost versus the volume of leads and the volume of clicks.

Casey

And this is why I'm an SEO at heart. But the reality is, the reality is is that bigger firms that go above their plateau is that they continue to invest in these things because there's something that people don't about a lot in the SEO world because a lot of SEO experts just like to say, oh look, it's all going to be rainbows and chocolate rivers and all of these things, but we can do everything according to Google standards. And at the end of the day, we can still see some traffic reductions. And that's why I think it's important to have a multi-pronged strategy. And that's what these firms that have gotten over these growth plateaus have figured out is like, Hey, we need to invest in these multiple areas, not just one, not just SEO, not just paid ads. We need to have multiple channels and we need to be able to turn those levers, turn it up for what's working down the other way based on how Google changes. Because they don't tell us before they do things, they just fricking do it.

Leann

And algorithm updates just shoots everything in the foot automatically. And that's also why you need a human.

Casey

That's true. Yeah.

Leann

The softwares aren't going to catch those things or really tell you. I would say even with Google, they give you suggestions. Most of them 90, 99 0.9% of the time, they're not really good suggestions.

Casey

Are they too generic or why are they not good?

Leann

Yeah, I would say too generic or they're just not in line with the strategy. It doesn't read a human strategy and say, oh, this is what we're trying to do. They're saying we need to get, if you want more cases or whatever your volume is trying to be or whatever your strategy is within the system, that's what it's going to go towards. But if say you're getting a lot of leads for a certain area that's going to keep saying, oh, keep doing this, this looks really good, but that's not what we want. So I think again, it's helpful, but at the end of the day, the human has to make it work.

Casey

Got it. Well, let's start by going into some trends that I think we're starting to see right now and just the way that things are going and some different technologies. We've already dabbled on quite a few of 'em early on, but some of the ones that I get questions are local and voice search optimization. I remember, God, it was like eight years ago, I was speaking at a conference maybe longer and I was like, Hey, voice search is going to be the next best thing. We have Siri and these assistants and it's going to be big. And that was a big prediction that a lot of people were saying, and at the time we were all wrong. What's funny though, now we're kind of seeing a little bit more of a resurgence of that with large language models, chat, GPT or these AI bots where people are talking to them. And so search behavior will change over time. You and I search different things like if we were to do whiteboards, we should do this as an example one time and

Casey

Say, how are you going to search for this and write down what we would type in. It'd be two different things and now people are doing more of these informational type queries.

Leann

How do you search?

Casey

It depends on the search

Leann

To say, are you going to a restaurant?

Casey

It depends. So I'm bougie and I like nice restaurants, think you know that about me.

Leann

I do.

Casey:

I travel a lot and because of that, I've found that there's one review platform worldwide that works very well and it might surprise you, it's actually Google reviews for me to do search now, I would actually pull up Gemini, so not even google.com. I pull up their AI assistant and I'd say, give me a list based on reviews. Put it in a table of the top 10 X restaurants. I'm looking for only restaurants that have over 50 reviews and 4.6 or higher and have it do all the legwork for me. It's agent will go out and deliver that to me in a table and then you decide where you're going to go and then I decide where I'm going basically based off that. But you're starting to see that too with LLMs right now. If you type in a query in Google and just say, who's the best personal injury lawyer in San Diego? It's going to tell you from sources across the internet what they think the best is. Is it right? Not necessarily. Probably not. Is it showing the people that its data has trained the most on essentially going back to what you said, showing up more places?

Leann

Yeah,

Casey

That's all it is. You have to be ranked on these best lists. You have to be in more places. This is a concept of barnacle, SEO that I spoke about a decade ago. It's still the same. That's what I'm saying. SEO is dead, but it's really,

Leann

It's just in a different platform, really what it is.

Casey

Yeah, it's really, or showing up. It's actually more of the same. And ironically, it's more of the same of what I was telling people to do 10 years ago because people avoided not getting on all these different directories and things because they were low. Being number one on yellow pages.com in your market is going to have probably a very small effect to your bottom line. Are you going to sign cases from that? You might sign a couple, but now what's happening? These large language models, Chachi, pt, whatever is going on, and it's training on these data sets, these structured data sets, these lists, these best lists like the ones we create for our clients, and it says, Hey look, this information is backed by sources. I'm going to trust this. And it learns just about being in more places. I started this by saying the importance of voice search, and I do think that's still going to be key and more key moving forward. I don't know, what are your thoughts on that? I feel like I just dominated that conversation.

Leann

No, I think you're more knowledgeable about that than I am. This is kind of what you live and breathe right now.

Casey

Are you calling me a nerd?

Leann

A little I nerd. 

Casey

Fair enough. 

Which is a good thing you teach us all. I don't know if I have too much of an opinion here. I definitely agree with you. I do not look up restaurants that in depth.

Casey

You're not that serious about it. 

Leann

But I do go on Google reviews and that's how I determine. But that's a great way, good example of using,

Casey

I may have also built an AI tool that does this. 

Leann

I wouldn't put it past you. I wouldn't put it past you. I use Siri a lot, those types of things. But

Casey

See, the point is it's different. There's a different journey and depending on your demographic for what your ideal clients are, that’s where you want to be.

Leann

So I want to plan, and I think I am getting older, my birthday's coming up trying to plan for my trip, but that's a great way of maybe figuring out locations and how to do that, asking Gemini great reviews, set up a table of where I should go, blah, blah.

Casey

But it's also kind of funny. We trust it. I trust it. I think I trust reviews assuming that a lot of 'em are not fake, which I know there's a lot of review fraud being in the industry. I guess that's kind of the sticky point for me. The point I'm trying to make is the problem is it doesn't have to be true. You could be the personal injury attorney that started your firm two years ago and has gotten no six figure settlements, but still show up as a best list if you're in the right places. Unfortunately,

Leann

I think that is the where, again, going back to the very beginning of this conversation, human is important because AI can give you a list based off of what it deems important, but it could not be really that great. Some of the best restaurants I've been to has great reviews, and I go there and man, I've had a Wagyu steak way better cooked over here versus here, and their reviews are great, and AI says this is top tier, best of the best, but I've had the steak over there that's like, that's probably way better.

Casey

I was just laughing to myself because

Leann

The Wagyu.

Casey

Yeah, well, because I was like, man, I am bougie because like I go to steakhouse sometimes and I'll order the A five, which is the best beef you can get, and I will judge a restaurant off of that one bite or whatever that I get. So

Leann

I'm just, yeah, it is bougie.

Casey

Just making fun of myself internally. But no, that's a good point about the AI and it actually leads me to my next topic, which is the way that Google and basically any source is probably trying to treat information. Google calls it EEAT or YMYL, which is your money, your life basically, if you're creating content that's going to affect somebody's money or their life, Google is going to particularly rate that under a different lens. They're going to look at that differently than what restaurant you want to go to or what golf course you want to play at.

Casey

Having a great content team gets it right, and having AI content gets it wrong because if you are only using AI to create content, something that we've experimented a lot with over the years, past two years in particular, we've seen, oh, look, you can get some results here, but is that short-term or long-term? The problem is AI content hallucinates, it's all about your prompts at the end of the day. So I also don't want to say that it can't be done to a really good standard. It can with the right guardrails and the right prompts, succession of prompting, but people are lazy. And that's the biggest problem I've seen with AI right now and other legal marketing agencies is they're like, I will do a hundred pieces of content for your law firm. If you own your law firm, you don't care how many pieces of content I put on your website, you honestly shouldn't. What you should care about is the business metrics.

Leann

Absolutely. Yeah.

Casey

Do you have those conversations with clients?

Leann

I have those conversations with our staff a lot of the time, especially our content director. We talk about that all the time. People coming to us from the sales side saying they want five 10 pieces of content or they're comparing us with someone else, it's like, oh, they're going to give us X amount of content. Well, some months you may not need content. Some months you may just need to optimize content. Maybe you just need really to move the needle is one to two pieces of really great content. I think that's the misconception too of yeah, AI can create it fast, but a lot of the time it's not going to be quality. Some laws may not be set up properly.

Casey

And then the other problem with content too is we use the StoryBrand framework. That's what we're certified in. With a proper framework, you will see a higher conversion rate and it's very clear if you type in, I see it all the time, go type in San Francisco car accident lawyer or something right now, click on those top five results and just look at it under the context of what your client sees. And nine times out of 10, it's actually just SEO shit. And I say that because even if it's a well-written article that could be written from one attorney to another attorney when their audience is actually people that were seriously injured in a car accident with an eighth grade education, who are we speaking to? What action are we telling them to take? So just ranking isn't enough. We don't even have to talk about the nuances of ranking about how they change depending on where you're searching from or what time of day it is or all of these other factors. That's why rankings inherently are bad metric. But the problem that you really need to fix is if you are already ranking, how are you going to make that page convert more if it's not producing cases for you? There's an inherent problem there.

Leann

Well, I think we solved this recently with an example of we have this particular client had a bunch of content pieces. They ranked well really well in the past. They are revisiting those pages, and all we needed while we were getting beat out by other particular companies was guides. So a specific area of improvement was just to include guides on this particular subject,

Casey

What to do after a car accident guide.

Leann

Yeah, so adding a guide, that's what was ranking for these other, so we dropped down because that just wasn't included in the page. So again, it's not creating new content or it's not creating X amount of content, but just looking at what's there, seeing what the competitor's doing or how we can be different from the other pieces of content and then moving the needle with adding or whatever we need to do to get there. Once that's done, we're now able to rank with the other competitors. And it wasn't creating new content, you're just adjusting what was already there.

Casey

What's already there. Yeah, exactly.

Leann

So I think those things are important. AI is not going to think about that.

Casey

It's

Leann (27:04):

Not going to do that

Casey

Well, and as an SEO owner, that's one of the things I see all the time is like, look, we have 10,000 pages on our website and then I just do a quick analysis and I'm like, well, only four of those pages are bringing you any traffic.

Casey

So that brings down the quality of your site overall. People don't realize the SEO nuances. And I think that's another problem that you see is that you can solve small problems in SEO pretty easily with ai. Like, oh, let's make sure all these pages meet this minimum requirement and have a page titled, unless you're looking at it under the full context, that creativity side, we're just not there yet. And that's one thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about. How can we solve these problems at a greater scale faster for our clients so that they can sign cases faster? And it's just something that I'm constantly just racking my brain on.

Leann

And I think too, not to beat this to death, but the analysis part of bringing in a new client or looking at your own business is a huge piece of the puzzle. The analysis of actually looking at site structure, looking at what's already included, what should be there, what shouldn't be there. A lot of site structure. If you really take that, put it in screening frog and do it in a visual queue, is it actually working to your advantage or is it all not?

Leann

So, I think that's a simple piece. It's not about how many pieces of content that could solve a ton of issues itself.

Casey

And that's why I like to reverse engineer. I think a good conversation to have with yourself if you're a firm owner is how many cases are we signing right now a month? Are those serious injury? Are they soft tissue? Whatever your goals are, and you need to say, Hey, look, in six months, this is where we need to be. And then just working that backwards and saying, we actually find that the average case value is $20,000 and we need to do 10 of these cases a month more than we're doing now. How do we get those? We know that if it's we're using website traffic as a metric, we need to generate, or if leads are a metric for every 10 leads, we sign four cases, which would be very high. But if you have a very solid intake system, which is something that we see with the high performing firms, they're seeing a lot better results as well. And their speed to lead is there. They're responding to leads fast. But the point being is you can just reverse engineer that and say, we know that with a thousand visits you're getting 10 contacts or whatever that math works out to be, then you just build the plan to do that. Unless you put that kind of attention and build it back that way, you are going to get caught up on what are my rankings today? There's a lot of bad metrics in this industry.

Leann

That's true. And I think a lack of transparency of that as well.

Leann

That’s true. So I think transparency is key for both sides of the agency, and this is something I'm very passionate about, but on the client side, it's client side as well. So transparency for agency, transparency for client, no matter who or what type of client you are, law firm, whatever. If we're not talking about ROI and we're not talking about those types of metrics and we're being transparent with that, we can't really work backwards.

Casey

What metrics are important for a law firm to track if they want to?

Leann

Yeah, I mean cases, how much a case costs is.

Casey

Yeah, cost per

Leann

Case. People don't want to talk about, right?

Casey

They don't want to share that anyway,

Leann

And it's not something we really doing with IT or agencies, maybe some agencies do, but now we can work backwards and say, oh, well, if this is the cost per case and we're getting X amount of leads, this is what we need to work to, or this is where we're at, okay, maybe we can't work with you because we don't have the volume or the team,

Casey

The P and l doesn't lie.

Leann

That goes both ways. So I think transparency from the client of numbers and where things are at so we can actually do our jobs better, and also giving transparency from us, this is how much you're spending, this is where it all goes line item by line item, and this is what the data proves from line item by line item.

Casey

And obviously we don't have full attribution the way that we would like, but at the end of the day, we can track calls, we can track live chats, text messages, at least from one of their source points on their journey there from an attribution standpoint and model. There's different ways to approach that, but the point is is there's a lot of that data there, and you can make solid business decisions and reverse engineer those goals if you just start tracking it.

Leann

And I think one thing that's not tracked is probably referrals

Casey

That too.

Leann

So tracking referrals and creating a system that is actually tracking those because once they're referred, they're not probably seen or are we making a good case

Casey

And brand growth too, which is that new metric we were talking about tracking for our clients because people like to do business with who they know or or trust. And with SEO changing so much people are getting more brand traffic if you're actually growing a brand, but it's usually agencies that are building that brand traffic. And so how can you measure that? Well, one way would be are you seeing brand growth month over month?

Leann

True. Yeah, I agree with that.

Casey

Let's talk about, let's say that I run a $4 million firm and my marketing budget, being a personal injury firm is probably going to be higher than your traditional firm, so it's going to be multiple tens of percentages usually. What allocation would you say firms need to do paid versus other channels, SEO or social? Do you have any insight there?

Leann

I think it all goes back to the goal of the client really. If they're getting enough lead volume and they just need more or they're getting enough lead volume and they want to attract a specific area of the firm, we've had a lot of clients, they get a lot of personal injury, like car accident cases, but they really like the med mal and

Leann

They just want to focus there. I think different strategies contribute to different allocated services.

Casey

Yeah, I know for sure,

Leann

But I think that's a hard one. I can,

Casey

No, it would depend on the goals. That's right.

Leann

Yeah.

Casey

It's funny though, you said something lead volume and that triggered something else that I see very commonly. A lot of times I'm not sure that firms, they think they need more leads, but really what they need is to respond to those leads that they're getting that speed to lead within the first 30 seconds or the first minute or less.

Casey

Like the big well-oiled machines, the bigger firms, that's what they do. I don't think people necessarily realize that I can't take an hour or a day or I can't not answer my phone. Essentially. This is like you're losing that business. If they're calling you after having done a little research about you and you don't answer the phone, they're going to go somewhere else.

Leann

It's true. I think that also goes to the point of we've had huge firms, 4 million or whatnot, think they have a good answering system and then the transparency of us or tools in place or anybody doing transparency from agency to client, listening to those calls and realizing they don't have a good answering system and bringing that to the table and saying, this is potentially why you're losing X amount of revenue if we fix this problem. So a lead volume system where calls are being answered and answered properly and correctly and sending it to the right areas in the firm, I think we see constantly time over time a big problem with just lead volume and navigating that.

Casey

Essentially though, you need to track metrics that you want that are important to you,

Casey

And it's quick, it's easy to join. These leads aren't closing, but you do need to have a tight handle on that stuff. You need to call your own answering service after hours, during hours and just give yourself a realistic picture of what's happening. Fill out those forms, those live chats, and is it a good customer experience? Because that is an easy win opportunity I think for firms that just want to get more out of what they already have. It's just refine those processes and respond quicker and respond thoughtfully and better. That's also a review opportunity, which guess what? That helps with local SEO, right?

Leann

Yep.

Casey

So Leanne, I know we have a webinar coming up in the next week or so here, or I guess I do, but one of the things that we're going to be talking about is another strategy that I just wanted to touch on real quickly. I know that you've worked with some of our clients or worked with our team members who I worked with, our clients who have done it, where they've kind of maximized, maybe they've put a lot of effort into their local SEO and their ranking pretty well across their city there. I am talking about ranking again, but just using that as an illustration. They're performing, but they have bigger ambitions and that's not doing as well as they want. I think a mistake that I've seen people do is just trying to put more and more focus on something that we can't control fully because of geography or where that person is searching from, and instead think about how can I put my marketing dollars to work in a way that I can track, and that might be expanding offices to other locations. You've worked with clients that have done that and seen some tremendous growth from that, right?

Leann

Huge. Yeah. We've had firms starting minimal dollars with one location now they're six, seven locations and they're just dominating the area. And I think if we can help them grow in one area and really hone in and

Leann

Do it right, they're able to grow pretty quickly over the next year or year and a half. Again, those things don't take a lot to get there. It's just if they're willing to trust an agency and put in, the agency is doing the right things,

Casey

Well, you got to put in the reps, you got to do the work, and there's a bit of patience and things don't always go to plan, unfortunately, as much as any agency would love to tell you.

Leann

And I think it goes back to of as much real estate as we can give you, right? As many locations, as much real estate on the web getting you make sure you're getting followed and you're not indexed or making sure you are indexed with Chachi, bt, and all of these things. So you're searchable, you're showing up in all the places that people are searching,

Leann

So voice or not voice, apple or Microsoft, it all matters. So showing up I think is important.

Casey

Showing up and then also being presented as the expert. I think that you had talked about creating those guides, things we've done in the past too, like creating books and stuff, like becoming an authority in your niche. Let people know that you're the expert. There's no point in being the best kept secret that's not going to help your business grow. It's not going to help you get known for anything. And it's also that kind of will lead me on another tangent of niching down is a little bit easier marketing. If you're known as the motorcycle accident lawyer in Topeka, Kansas, and that's all you do, it's easier over time to build a brand that people will know, recognize and probably build a lot of referral business to.

Leann

It's true. I think there's a guy in Chicago that, what is he? He doesn't even have a number on his.

Casey

Oh yeah. We were looking at that when we were in Chicago.

Leann

I just had a conversation with a client the other day. It's like, well, we have to have this specific number on a billboard. Well, this attorney didn't, but it was such a dynamic billboard that he didn't need it. I don't know how they're going to call him, however, I still remember

Casey

They remember the name. They Google it.

Leann

Yeah,

Casey

That brand growth searches, see?

Leann

Yeah. Yeah,

Casey

I was talking about measuring that.

Leann

It's just a different in a different world these days.

Casey

So Leanne, we're getting kind of to the end here of our time. I wanted to give you a couple minutes to talk about these law firms that have hit their plateau. What does it look like? What does the action steps to get away from just grinding the gears and getting to a place where you can see consistent growth or growth with your goals?

Leann

I think if you're hitting the plateau, if you are working with an agency, I think making sure that they're innovative and they're coming to you with brand new ideas and thoughts. I think that's important. And I think if you're hitting the plateau, something is not being revamped or something's not changing or you need to look at a different location. If you're really dominating the area and things are just really consistent, but you're not really growing, maybe you should look internally, externally into different locations at least. I think it's all about innovation and creativity, though.

Casey

It's a good way to stand out

Leann

The bread and butter of old SEO tactics and these SEO pieces work. They're not dead, but it's going to take two innovative thought and different ideas outside of the box that

Casey

Stand out. You're the same as everyone else. You're not going to stand out. We're always talking about differentiation

Leann

Internally,

Casey

And I think that's so important and you nailed that. That's so important, especially again, working with SEO agencies in general. It's like, Hey, look, we have you on a monthly retainer. We're going to do X, Y, and Z and that's it. And then they kind of maybe ignore the brand, ignore that conversion aspect, and that's why it's like everything has to be shaped around business goals. I love that you said that earlier too, and I think more people need to have those conversations with their agencies if they're not already. You're COO of Juris Digital. How can clients better be prepared to have better discussions with their agency and what should they expect from an agency to get a more collaborative effort if they feel like they're not getting that now, what would you say?

Leann

What our clients have done to us too, back in the day, what new ideas do you have for me? Yes, you care about cases, and I think that those questions change perspective, and if you're not asking what new ideas, what's going to differentiate you from everybody else? Everybody's seen the lawyer billboards, they've seen the lawyer ads, they've seen different things, they've seen the goofy photos. We've seen it all. But what is going to make you stand out now across all platforms and giving you the most real estate possible and giving you the most traffic? If agencies aren't trying stuff and wanting to try stuff, if you as a business owner are not wanting to try stuff, then probably the needles not going to move and you will plateau. We have to

Casey

Invest in anything you want to see some change in time or money or both.

Leann

And if it's a weird idea, if it's got a good if strategy behind it and at least a piece or two works and there's good data, what would

Casey

Hurt? And it's within your bar guidelines.

Leann

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Casey

And legal.

Leann

Yeah, illegal. All the things, the boundaries. Of course. What does it hurt to try something new and different and push the needle a little bit and push the boundaries. A bit of that.

Casey

Awesome. Cool. Well, Leanne, thank you very much for taking the time to join me today. I found this very insightful, talking, nerding out with you, talking about personal injury, SEO. What's that?

Leann

We should do it again sometime.

Casey

We did, yeah. If you're listening to this or watching this, please make sure to and share this video. This is a new format for us. We're new to it, but we're trying it out and listen to what you think. Positives, negatives. Thanks so much.

Leann

Yeah, thank you.