Winning Local SEO in 2025 – Proven Strategies with Steve King

In this episode of the Lawyer Mastermind Podcast, Casey Meraz and SEO expert Steve King dive into the evolving world of local SEO in 2025. From AI-driven search changes to the impact of E-E-A-T and backlink strategies, we break down what law firms must do to stay competitive. Whether you're looking to dominate local search, improve website conversions, or build a stronger brand, this episode has actionable insights to help your firm grow.

Steve King, Director of Existing Growth at Juris Digital, brings years of experience in legal SEO and content marketing. With a background in copywriting and digital strategy, he specializes in helping law firms increase visibility, generate leads, and sign more cases. His expertise in sustainable marketing strategies ensures that firms can adapt to ever-changing search trends.

Links: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenking1982/

👉 Subscribe for more legal marketing insights!

⏱ Chapters:
00:00 – Intro & Episode Overview
Casey Meraz welcomes Steve King to discuss the future of local SEO for law firms in 2025.

02:05 – Is SEO Still Worth It in 2025?
The current state of local SEO and why it's still a powerful tool for law firms.

04:28 – The Evolution of Content: What Works Now?
Why high-quality, user-focused content is more critical than ever.

07:12 – Using Client Questions to Improve SEO
How law firms can leverage intake calls and FAQs to create more relevant content.

10:24 – Niche vs. General SEO: What’s More Effective?
How narrowing your focus to a specific practice area can boost rankings and conversions.

15:01 – Building Authority with E-E-A-T
How experience, expertise, authority, and trust impact rankings.

18:34 – AI & Zero-Click Searches: How to Stay Visible
How Google’s AI overviews and answer boxes are changing search behavior.

21:53 – The Power of Backlinks & Local SEO Strategies
Why local citations, PR, and high-quality backlinks still matter in 2025.

26:10 – Brand Growth & SEO: The Overlooked Metric
Why tracking branded searches is critical for long-term success.

30:27 – Key Takeaways & Actionable Steps for Law Firms
Final thoughts on what law firms should focus on to dominate local SEO in 2025.

#LocalSEO #LawFirmMarketing #LegalSEO #ElevatedMarketing

Transcript

Casey

Sponsored by Juris Digital. Hello and welcome to the Lawyer Mastermind podcast. I'm your host, Casey Meraz, and today I'm joined with Steve King. Steve, thanks for joining me today. 

Steve

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Casey

Of course. Now Steve, to give a little bit of background today we've agreed to talk about the state of local SEO in 2025, and I guess we should just dive right into it. But before we dive in, I was going to say, how long have you been working with attorneys in SEO

Steve

With attorneys specifically? We're coming up on 10 years, so we're at right around nine year mark.

Casey

It's been a while.

Steve

Yeah,

Casey

So you've seen it obviously change come and go.

Steve

Yes.

Casey

You've seen strategies that work and strategies that fail?

Steve

Yes. It used to be a lot easier. I'll say that. Yeah,

Casey

10

Steve

Years ago it was a little bit easier to get somebody ranked and start getting the leads coming in. For sure.

Casey

That's true. Yeah. I mean, if you're talking like 2015, back at that time, a lot of firms still weren't even involved in SEO.

Steve

Absolutely. People didn't know what it was. It was still kind of a foreign concept to a lot of business owners I think.

Casey

So let's just get right into it is 2025, we have chat, GPT, we have LLMs, we have all this going on. What is the state of SEO in 2025 in your opinion?

Steve

So if I had to just kind of generalize it or summarize it, the state of SEO is just you get out what you put in, I think. So if you're willing to make an investment, if you're willing to see it through, if you're willing to put in the time the work or have somebody who can competently put the work in for you, you're going to see results. At some point, the timeline might not be as long as you want. It could be a little bit longer, especially if you're in a big market. But in general, it's still something that's worth pursuing and still going to I think bring you the best leads and set you up for success with a firm.

Casey

That's

Steve

Where I think we're at with it.

Casey

And obviously we have some bias. We've seen a lot of success through that channel, so I don't want to discount that, but that is the reality, right? We still see today it's mid-February 2025. We're still seeing a lot of great results from it. What do you think, let's just talk about from a strategy perspective, how have you seen that shift a little bit over the years and what are you seeing that might be working now?

Steve

I think one of the biggest shifts that you've seen over the last decade or even really the last five years is how good your content needs to be to rank and that you can't just throw something up. You can't just spin content, make the same a bunch of duplicate practice area pages where you change a few words and change your keywords and load it up. I think the content you're creating, you need to be creating with purpose. You need to be using it to build that authority. The helpful content updates, kind of what everybody's talked about in the last year or two, and that's a lot about getting rid of that thin content, getting rid of things that don't really help the user at all. 

And so I think that's kind of a big area where you really have to focus on how good your content, who's writing your content, are you making sure that it's good? Are you making sure that it's carrying the message that you want it to carry, and are you making sure that it's useful for people

Casey

For your actual clients?

Steve

Yeah, the people that are going to hire you. Not, is this good enough for another lawyer?

Do I sound smart enough when I write it or not? That kind of thing. But really, is this going to help my client? Is this going to make my client want to reach out to me? Is this going to help them find me? I think one of the most important things that you have to consider

Casey

For sure, and it's funny you said a lot of things there that I want to unpack, but one of 'em that came to mind is I started this conversation talking about is 2025 and maybe a lot has changed, but then you said spinning content. And I was like, holy moly. We're back 2010. We were, we're back 2008, whatever. I was working with a law firm in California and they wanted to create a lot of practice area pages for all these different cities, and the solution at that time was effectively spinning content, which is for those of the audience don't know, it was basically taking an article and changing words out for synonyms and making it different enough. That's hilarious. What people are kind of doing with CHATT PT essentially right now. It's a little bit more sophisticated than that, but it's the same in some way.

Steve

We've come full circle. I know we're back to it,

Casey

So that's hilarious. Yeah. And then also when we're talking about the importance of content, like everybody says quality content, what does that really mean? Because everybody might have different metrics for that. What is quality content to you and how would you judge that?

Steve

So there's a couple of things that you have to be considering, right? There's the Google algorithm. What do they consider quality content? I want them to see it as valuable, but ultimately if it ranks but it doesn't resonate, you're still going to be falling short. Somebody's going to click on your page, they're going to look at this wall of text and they're going to go somewhere else.

Casey

Okay. And you bring up a good point there because time after time, we see pages that rank like you're ranking for car accident where you're number one, but it's not generating cases because maybe it's written for a bot or

Steve

Yeah, maybe it's just written for rank, maybe it doesn't resonate. And that's when we get into conversion rate optimization and we're optimizing a page in a way that's going to make somebody encouraged to reach out to you. And you still want to have that content because there are at least some percentage of people who are kind of information gatherers. You've got a couple of different kinds of people when they're coming to the law firm website, they just want to talk to the lawyer as fast as they possibly can. They're looking for it, and that's great. I love those people. But you have just in other purchases that people make, you have the researcher person who's going to come in, they're going to look at your car accident lawyer page, and they want to see that you know what you're talking about. They want to see they're skeptical, they want to look at a little bit more detail. So your content needs to answer maybe some of the bigger questions that they have.

Casey

And

Steve

As a lawyer, you know already know what those questions are. If you have that experience, you know what they're asking. And in the SEO world, we kind of can look and get some insight about what those questions are based on what people are asking. And we kind of find out, Hey, what do I do after a car accident?

Casey

Exactly.

Steve

Do I really need a lawyer for this or is this something, can I trust the insurance company? To be fair and honest with me.

Casey

No, you're exactly right. And I think that you're onto something else, Sarah. So I built this tool, didn't really release it because I got mad because CallRail started working on something similar. But anyway, where I was taking transcripts from calls coming into law firms and I was having AI analyze it and auto extract the questions because when we're creating content or we are obviously looking at keyword tools and getting all that or using different strategies for that, but there's probably a lot intake and people are answering these questions a hundred times a day, and if people are asking 'em on the phone, they've got to be searching for them at some point too, right?

Steve

Yeah. Well that's a good thought. Any way that you can find out what those questions are and then answer them in your content, I think puts you ahead of people who are just writing

For an algorithm, just trying to make sure they have the kind of check the boxes off.

Whereas, if you're creating that content with intention, I think long-term it's going to pay off and it might not be every page, but you're going to see certain pages of content that hit for you and they become that big lead generator.

Casey

Kind of that you're looking for.

Casey

No, that's true. And every market I think is a bit different, and that's more true probably now than ever because there's more choice. Maybe we're seeing for the first time Google's search share percentage drop by not a lot, but a couple percentage points and that traffic's going somewhere else. It's going to chat GPT or it's going to Bing or plexity. There's a lot of choice out there now. And so circling that back to creating good content, I think that one of the things you were saying, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but you really have to write for that person that you want to be your client and thus you need to answer whatever that question is, I guess thoroughly.

Steve

Yeah, I think it's tougher for lawyers to say what that ideal client is because if you're talking to a personal injury lawyer, it's anybody who was in a car accident and got hurt, it's anybody who got in too much trouble or something like that, you don't necessarily care. You don't have that customer profile where if I were selling comic book, I would have this exact profile of the kind of person to go after and it's a little more defined. So that's where it comes to putting yourself in those person's shoes. When that event happens to them, what are they asking? And kind of delivering on that is one of the keys, I think.

Casey

Yeah, and it's a bit ironic because I remember years ago, and even to this day, we do kind of hyperfocused website, so it's like a website just on that one topic. I'm a motorcycle accident attorney. It's easier to rank when you niche down. It is easier if you do decide to do that. Now I think the problem is we see a lot of firms that don't ever go to that level. They will just say, Hey, I'm generic personal injury, I take all personal injury cases. And then yeah, it is harder to find your IC ideal customer profile because you are riding for everybody. But ironically, we do I think better or at least more tailored and targeted results the further that you niche down, you're definitely going to get only motorcycle leads if you're known as the motorcycle king or whatever. Yeah,

Steve

That's definitely true. And you can see some of these firms that are in, this is a random example, they're in west Texas, southern New Mexico, and this area is big for oil fields. So you'll see they'll really specialize into truck and oil field accidents and that can pay dividends if they're known as that person who, hey, there was that big accident and this firm kind of came to bat, they went to trial for it. And you can get a name for yourself doing that for sure. Really niching down. I think the more you can get a name for yourself, the more that your brand is something, the easier it's to rank organically for

Casey

Absolutely.

Steve

Any kind of search words that you're going after.

Casey

Yeah, I mean just from an authoritative standpoint, Google's knowledge panelists essentially, and the way that they are looking at entities, it's like, Hey, if everything about you is motorcycle accident, going back to that example, your citations where you're listed on Yelp and FindLaw, your business name, all the content you're writing about, it's easy to connect all those dots. It's easier for search engines, but also it would be the same for LLMs I think as well, because they're training on large data sets and best list and other content out there. So anyway, that's interesting. So since I want to bring it back a little bit more to what's working in 2025, I want to get some fast takes from you on a couple different things that people may have heard. One is EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authority, and trust or formerly is just eat, but that's the newer version. How important is that?

Steve

I think it's got to be at least somewhat important. I think that it kind of ties into the helpful content thing. Who is going to create helpful content about a subject? Well, it's going to be somebody who's an expert in that realm. And then it goes back to how do I demonstrate that I'm that expert? And for an attorney, it's not too difficult to put these trust signals on your website that any kind of association that you're part of, even that you're a member of the state bar, these are the things that establish that you're an expert with an attorney. It is kind of easy because it's not abstract. I went to law school, I got a degree in this. I'm probably in some kind of organization, some kind of recognition that I can share on my website to kind of back up what I'm saying. I think that's easy for lawyers. I think that they're fortunate in that kind of way that they have that expertise naturally built in.

Casey

Yeah, exactly. And I think obviously if you're an attorney, you are speaking in lingo and I'm thinking, I'm doing it here already on this podcast, and I'm saying that out loud. I intending not to do it, but it ends up happening. It's definitely a problem. I do it too, search lingo. So I'm trying to break that down and be easier. But it goes back to that discussion we were having earlier, helpful content. If I'm injured in an accident, the content that I need probably needs to be written at an eighth grade level for anybody to understand very clearly. It's like with StoryBrand, if you confuse, you lose. It's so true.

Steve

No, absolutely. I still use readability checks.

Casey

Oh, you do? Okay.

Steve

If I'm going to do content myself, which is honestly pretty rare these days, but if I'm looking at or analyzing some content, I'll look at what the readability of that content is. I make sure that there's no passive voice in the content. I don't remember who said it and I don't remember what the exact quote is, but there's something, basically when you're writing something you shouldn't be writing to make yourself look smart. You should be writing to make other people feel smart. And you do that by hitting a broad reading level where they can easily understand what you're talking about. And when they can easily absorb it and easily understand it, that makes them feel good.

If they come and they read your content and it's complex and it's verbose and it's wordy, it's something that I've seen as a challenge with attorneys, oh, that's too simple. That doesn't sound, it needs to be, and they want to kind of doctor it up and make it. And you have to say, kind of have to check 'em a little bit and say,

You need this to be for the baseline level where anybody can read this and feel like they know what you're talking about. Yeah,

Casey

Exactly.

Steve

If they feel frustrated, they're not going to reach out to you. A lawyer can be intimidating for a lot of people. They don't want you to make 'em feel dumb. Yeah,

Casey

They're scared to pick up the phone as is a lot of times. And even if they're not scared, they're calling you because they're in their worst situation of their life.

That's why you need an attorney in most cases.

Steve

And you want to be serious, but you want to be approachable.

Casey

Yeah, no, you're right. And it's funny though, you said that, and it brought me back to when I was working with a Furman Southern California, the attorney, the managing partner was just so hell bent on basically producing, because he used to write for a big law school news review, and so he was in publishing and all that. And so everything we published had to be like, do you have to have a four year degree to even know what this is? And it's like,

Steve

No.

Casey

Yeah,

Steve

That's not the ideal content. Definitely dude definitely needs to be

Casey

Approachable. Fair enough. And there's a balance there too, but how do you go from trying to put your expertise and your brand into content while being different than every other one that's out there for trying to rank for car accident lawyer? Are there any tips or tricks that you use that are working?

Steve

So I think that if you already have a book of work, you have cases settled and things like that. I think that's a big one

Highlighting that I really think, and something that's challenging to get a lot of attorneys to do just because it's hard to get the time. It's a big ask for their clients that have been through something traumatic already and that's doing those kind of a success story or a case study of somebody that you worked with. And then I think what you get out of that is somebody who is going through something similar is able to put themselves kind of in that position and see how you work that through and walk that through and really took care of somebody else that's just that they can relate to. And I think that that connection can be really big for, and that goes into, really that's when we've already got that search presence. We're already showing up and we're getting people on the website and how do we finalize that? How do we get them to actually be a legitimate lead to reach out to us instead of somebody else?

And I think that can be a differentiator. When you're putting that kind of information on your website, they're able to come and see that and see, hey, here's somebody just like me and oh, here's how they walked through the whole process. And I can see that this attorney and this law firm was with them kind of the whole step of the way and that it worked out in a positive manner.

Casey

And there's other advantages to that too, not only on the conversion standpoint, but my mind went back to Google because now they're kind of declaring war a little bit on AI and saying, well, you need to be writing about things that are a bit more unique and not completely regurgitated shit. And that's a great way to do it. Like your actual experience,

Steve

You're having original content and they might do something similar, but your content's going to be so original. It's about one person, it's about one specific case. It's not I'm a car accident lawyer

After a car accident, take pictures and then go get treatment for your injuries and then call me. And then the next step after that is we're going to do this. Everybody can put that and you might need it to get it to the rank, but yeah, what is that content? What's the content that's going to make you a little bit different? It's going to make 'em reach out to you instead. And as much as you can empathize with somebody and present a shared experience, I think you're going to have an advantage.

Casey

And how important is site speed 2025?

Steve

Oh, site speed. I think site speed is one of those baseline things. Okay.

Casey

Table stakes.

Steve

So I don't think that if your slight is slow right now and now you make it fast, now you're going to rank number one. And I think that when you get into SEO in general, there's a lot of that, especially that expectation from the business owner. So you're an attorney, you're putting themselves in your shoes, and you talk to an agency or somebody that you've hired to do your in-house SEO, and the site speed is one of the things that's holding us back back. We're going to adjust it. And then sometimes something clicks in their mind where it's like, okay, we do this and then we're going to, number one, we're going to rank number one, and it's not when

Casey

I live on a beach.

Steve

Yeah, it's not that cut and dry. If it were, it would be, yeah, we're going to go retire early, but it's important if, because if you're, if you page speed isn't up to snuff, you're not ever going to have a chance of competing.

Casey

It's table stakes. You got to do it. Exactly.

Steve

It's part of the foundational thing. You need to have a quick website, especially on mobile. It needs to load right away. It needs to be mobile friendly, it needs to be easy to navigate on a phone. Way over half people are searching on their smartphone for that kind of thing. And so it's one of those, I've got to have it and it's not too hard to have it.

Casey

No, it's not. And it's just getting easier to be honest.

So now I want to talk a little bit about this. I'm not sure how many of our listeners or viewers have been paying attention, but we're starting to see more zero click searches and AI answers. And for example, you do a search and instead of getting just the organic links that you would typically see your local results, you're seeing those AI summaries, the A IO AI overviews is what they call them, and there's a list of other firms there, for example, or maybe they're answering the question there and it's not resulting in the click to the website. What is your feeling and take on any of that,

Steve

The bane of the SEO specialist's existence here, and it's definitely an intentional thing as Google tries to keep, well, their job is to make money

Steve

Monetize search. They want to keep people on the website until they get an advertising click. That's the reality of it. So it's definitely something that we deal with now, and it's one of the reasons why I think that a multifaceted approach is really, really important.

Steve

You need to be everywhere that you have the potential to be, especially if you have the budget for it. So that means participating in LSAs, participating in Pay-per-click, and getting your SEO all buttoned up more realistic. I've told clients in the past, I don't really care if nobody ever goes to your website.

Steve

You care about cases if you have a top three listing on Google in the Maps, so we're back to talking about SEO. A little further down than all the advertising stuff, but that still gets a ton of clicks. That map pack, especially

Steve

On mobile, you got the phone number right there. If you're getting into the top three of that mobile pack, you're getting some of those zero click searches or one click searches at least where somebody's coming, like I said, I don't care if they never go to your website, if they hit the call button, they get through to you, you sign 'em up, great. Never look at the website, don't care.

Casey

It doesn't matter because you care about the case.

Steve

Yeah. So we talk about a SERP or a search engine results page and it looks a lot different than it used to look. Definitely.

Casey

Yeah, it does

Steve

So getting as much real estate as you can on that SERP is essential.

Casey

Yeah, and it's funny too because you say that because again, going back 10 years or whatever, it's the exact same fricking strategy like barnacle, SEO, all over a long time ago, whether you call it share of search or barnacle, SEO, it's not, let's see what's actually ranking in your market. It's a law firm and it's Yelp and it's avo, and it's whatever you do need to be on all of them. I think the stakes are a bit higher now than they were though, because we know that Gemini or chat, GPT, these large language models are training on other data. And so the more sources that you were in, kind of like citations and local SEO.

Steve

Absolutely. And that kind of goes to the other part of this. You talk about we're getting the AI answers, so you have to figure out what you can do to be part of the AI answers. Sure. So we're talking about getting as much real estate in that search engine results page as possible. Well, that's a big part of it if it's going to come up to the top. Now, fortunately, I don't yet see a lot of AI answers coming up. If I search personal injury lawyer near me or whatever type of lawyer I search for, occasionally I do see some ai, but not often. I usually still see the standard, here's your LSA, here's a couple PPC results, here's the map pack. But when you're getting into those, and this goes back to your content and answering those questions,

Steve

That’s what AI is doing is trying to answer somebody's question to the best of their ability. If you're answering those questions in your content, the AI is going to pull up and it's going to be your link is going to be in the AI result. And it might be a case where somebody says, oh, let me click this link because they seem to have answered my question. What else can they do for me?

Casey (22:14):

Yeah. Now, and that's another good point because I was just seeing, I just thought today for the first time Darren Shaw had posted something and it was basically how Google Local is going to work in the future, and they are starting to roll out, I guess, AI for local search, so maps and stuff. So you're going to be able to search who's the best personal injury attorney in this area, and then you can ask a follow-up question, well, who handles car accident questions? And it narrows that down. I don't know if that'll come to your money, your life at least for a while, which is just categories that Google, of course thinks are going to affect your money or your life. It treats those with a higher standard for attorneys and that's what they fall into. But we'll see. But that's just interesting because it's coming full circle. You need to be comprehensive, you need to be everywhere. You need to be thorough. And I think that's probably the biggest problem I see with AI content generators is people are lazy, first of all when they use 'em. So it's like single prompt, write me an article with 3000 words. It does this, this, and this, and it's a very lazy approach to prompting, but the result is very mediocre and it wouldn't really encompass all of that or tell that in a convincing story anyway.

Steve

Yeah, people think it's kind of a do all, so they don't have to do any work at all or put any thought into it. I definitely agree with that. And when I really started to actually make some headway with some AI things, it was when I started to have the AI help me write better prompts.

Casey

Yeah.

Steve

Just ask it that. What more information can I provide you? What else can I add to this prompt to make it easier to complete the task? And it'll answer you. It'll tell you, yeah,

Casey

The more information you give it, the less lazy you are, ironically, the better it will get.

Steve

Yeah. And that's what makes, so if you're going to have AI help you write content, you want it to be yours as much as possible, and

So you still want to do the groundwork, you still want to be the one doing research, whether that's assisted or not getting information and then feeding it to whatever tool you're using so that you're actually getting the best result. The worst way to do it is to put a prompt in, get a piece of content, maybe read through it real quickly, not really paying much attention, and then to post it. And that's going to get picked up. So they're

Casey

Kind of more declaring more on that. What's your thought on the importance of backlinks? I'm still a big backlink guy. I know you are big backlink proponent over here.

Casey

I just saw a study, I think it was from Joy Hawkins, but basically maybe it wasn't from her anyway, regardless whoever it was from, I'm sorry that I'm not quoting you. I don't remember who it was, but maybe we'll link for it here in the podcast. But basically they were saying for local queries, they're having a big impact was the study. It was like, Hey, anything that's localized personal injury attorney, Google knows where you're searching from. Of course that's going to play a lot bigger role than having links and this is their study. So not necessarily my experience, but

Steve

Well, I think just by, so it'd probably be cool Casey to do a study ourselves on, I'll quickly look into something for a client for one of our SEO teams might ask me a question or something, somebody's feeling stuck and I could pretty quickly ascertain that they're behind in links. This is the reason that these three people are ranking top three. They've got all these links, and then you look at the link profile that they have. And it can be intimidating sometimes for some of these bigger firms, but when it comes to local, the links that you want are probably not surprisingly local and you don't need a whole lot.

Casey

No. 


Steve

But if you have a local news affiliate linked to you, and if you have a local publication that's gone online linking to you, if you have community forums and people are talking about you and linking to you, these are all the kinds of links that are going to really propel your,

Casey

And it's kind of like the new citation as well. If they're training on this stuff and saying, Hey, look, this firm's always mentioned under best lists. That's great.

Steve

You're in Los Angeles and the Fox and the NBC affiliate link to you and you're in some of the Moline magazines and they're linking to you. It's something you can curate too.

Casey

Sure

Steve

It's going to take an investment, whether that's time, money, or both, but it's worth doing I think ultimately. And I think that's the kind of links you should be going for.

Casey

And we do a lot less link building these days, but I'm a big kind of PR still.

Steve

Yeah.

Casey

Some people that we know hate it altogether.

Steve

I think the digital PR, it is just another name for link building, but digital PR has kind of a multifaceted effect.

Casey

Well, you're building a brand as well. Exactly. People know you.

Steve

Years ago we had one of our client partners teamed up with Lyft.

Casey

Oh yeah, I remember that. For a cab ride

Steve

And it blew 'em up for years.

Casey

Yeah,

Steve

Blew up the brand. Their reviews on their Google listing went crazy, and they had this little partnership and they invested probably $5,000 in it.

Casey

Do you remember the Wall Street Journal mentions we got for the law firm that we worked with that basically they said, we want you to write an essay. It was very controversial, that's why I got all the news, but it was, we want you to write an essay about a time you admitted to driving drunk. No, I don't remember that. Yeah, that's crazy. It was a while ago. But yeah, I mean just like creative stuff like that. Not necessarily that you want to do that to your brand, but if people are open to it, we love testing. Marketing is testing at the end of the day, what works in 2025 or 2026 or whatever is not necessarily going to be the same.

Steve

Well, that's what I love about this space.

Casey

Yeah, it's always changing

Steve

And you should always be doing tests. I think a big part of what attorneys themselves I think should take away from this is that because if something fails a couple of times you're

Casey

Not failing means you're trying.

Steve

Yeah. It means you're trying new things and something's going to hit and you're going to be like, oh

Casey

Wow,

Steve

This one's working. It's going to be exciting. You're going to get cases from it and then it's going to encourage you to try more things.

Casey

That's the funny thing about SEO O2 though, because people take that the wrong way as well. Have you seen an example, because I've seen this plenty of times where they've been like, look, my competitor is beating me and look at the size of their firm. They're doing so much better and because of their observation of what they think is working for that firm, they say, we need to try that same thing. But a lot of times we don't actually know. We can see how many links they're getting. We can see what content they're getting and we can make some anecdotal observations of saying this is helping them in this way. But sometimes especially with digital marketing, they could be doing things that we don't fully understand or even know about and attributing that to the wrong. So I've seen law firms, I bring that up, I've seen firms invest in completely wrong strategies and keep on going all in even though the data doesn't back it up. That

Steve

Definitely is, it's really common. You see somebody and you think, I'm better at this than they are, and they're kicking my butt in marketing and how can I do exactly what they're doing? And that might be a little bit of the wrong line of thinking, definitely. It should be more just what can I be doing that's going to propel me and start chipping away at that lead that they might have on you? The reality is there's so many things that could go into it and it could be something stupid. It could be something completely ridiculous or why they're ranking for you. Maybe the domain that they're on is some domain that they bought that has 20 years of history or something ridiculous

Casey

Or they did some sneaky redirects to it or whoever,

Steve

Whatever it might be. And it's something that they might be doing something that'll come crashing down at some point and then what you've been doing will take precedence and suddenly you're outranking them.

Casey

I don't want to spend too much time on this kind of getting to the end here, but I was just thinking there's a reality there too. A lot of SEOs are using the same tools and data is not what you think it is. You can block the crawlers that they're using to get this data. So there's a lot of ways to obfuscate your SEO strategy if you are trying to do that, which is definitely something that we've done in the past and people could still be doing. So it's like there's so much that goes into it.

Steve

I think the key is to be willing to try different things and to just keep trying if something doesn't work right away.

Casey

So is that your big takeaway for 2025 as we get to the end here? What are a couple things or the parting knowledge you want to leave our guests with today?

Steve

I think my biggest takeaway, something I've been thinking about a lot and how we can help clients that we work with, but in how firms can help themselves. Or maybe they have somebody in-house or maybe they are doing it all themselves. To me, the biggest takeaway is to get involved locally in any way that you possibly can.

Casey

Are you saying build a brand?

Steve

Yeah. And I know that's different because it's not SEO, but the reality is when we talk about this all the time, there's so much information out there with SEO that it's not like it was 10 years ago. Almost everybody who is paying attention and doing it is going to be doing, they're going to go get citations, they're going to put good photos on their Google business profile.

Steve

They’re going to go respond to reviews. They're going to ask everyone to leave them reviews. You're all going to be doing the same thing. So how can you make yourself different in your market? And I do think that is by going out and getting involved in the local community and like we've already said and alluded to, it's going to help your SEO, you're out there in the community and people eventually are going to notice you're going to get those natural local links that we talked about.

Steve

People are going to search to search your brand and your name.

Steve

And the more that happens, I think there's a correlation in how you show up and search.

Casey

It does. We know Google uses click and search data.

Steve

People are now going to your website more. They're searching your name. This guy is a personal injury lawyer. His name is getting searched more now too. He must also be, we go back to the expertise, he also must be an expert in that

We're going to start showing him up, showing that firm, that person in results for a personal injury lawyer for a car accident.

Casey

Exactly. And that's why firms need to be tracking things like brand growth because attribution gets trickier and trickier all the time. We can't say that. I was looking at attribution on our own website yesterday and I saw this crazy journey somebody did, but not to get too off topic, really tracking your brand growth over time, like the number of searches that are happening for your brand and tracking that data. It would be something that everybody should be doing now kind of moving forward because it really shows you what's working and you're building an actual company, something that's going to be an asset that you can sell or retire, whatever.

Steve

And I think it's important to know if you are, because it's kind of easy. So say you're an attorney and you hire somebody and then you notice you're getting a lot of brand searches, it can kind of be easy to, well, that's just me. That might not have anything to do with this guy that I hired to do. But the reality is that it very well may have a lot to do with what that person's doing. So I think tracking that as you invest in your SEO, and I think that is a really good note and something to pay attention to.

Casey

Awesome. Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining me today. I had a blast nerding out with you talking about digital marketing for law firms.