What Smart PI Firms Do That You Probably Don’t with Law Firm SEO Expert Steve King

In this episode of the Lawyer Mastermind Podcast, Casey Meraz sits down with law firm SEO expert Steve King to unpack why personal injury SEO is so competitive—and how to win in 2025. From ranking myths to intake systems and multi-channel strategies, this episode is packed with real-world advice to help law firms grow smarter and sign more cases.

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/

👉 Like & subscribe for more digital marketing insights!

⏱ Chapters

00:00 – Intro: The Fierce Competition in PI SEO
 Why personal injury is the most competitive SEO space in legal.

01:37 – Ranking Gains That Drive Real Results
 How minor ranking jumps (like #5 to #3) impact lead volume.

04:08 – The Ranking Myth & Local SEO Challenges
 Why focusing only on rankings can lead firms astray.

06:59 – What Metrics Matter More Than Rankings
 Why tracking leads and ROI beats obsessing over keywords.

08:16 – Is Your SEO Agency Actually Performing?
 How to evaluate your agency based on real case outcomes.

10:04 – Attribution & ROI Tracking in 2025
 How firms can track calls, chats, and case value to calculate ROI.

13:38 – Speed to Lead: Your Silent Case Killer
 Why fast response and smart intake processes close more leads.

17:34 – Broken Intake = Broken ROI
 Red flags that show intake, not marketing, may be the problem.

19:06 – Casting Too Wide a Net Hurts Your Team
 Why niching down can reduce intake friction and improve results.

22:21 – Legal Automation & Intake Tech Trends
 Could AI intake agents be the future of personal injury marketing?

24:27 – Avoiding the “One-Basket” SEO Strategy
 Why multi-channel marketing is critical for growth.

27:07 – Smart Diversification: Where to Invest
 How to test new marketing channels without wasting budget.

28:41 – Local SEO & Reviews Still Matter
 Tips for building trust through reviews and community impact.

30:38 – Final Thoughts: You Can Still Compete
 Why smaller firms can win—and how to start now.

Transcript

Casey

Hello and welcome to the Lawyer Mastermind podcast. I'm your host, Casey Meraz, and today I'm joined by law firm, SEO expert, Steve King. Steve, thanks for joining me.

Steve:

Thanks for having me, Casey. Excited to be here.

Casey

Do you like that title Law Firm SEO expert?

Steve

I think it's fitting.

Casey

It is, yeah. No, I mean, you've been at this for a decade as we talked about, and today we're talking about a topic that I think will get a lot of interest, at least I hope so. But we're diving into the challenges of personal injury law firms and SEO, and especially why it's such a fiercely competitive space. You've been involved in that for a while. Would you say it's competitive? 

Steve
 
Personal injury must be the most competitive type of law that you can get into.

Casey

Well, especially for marketing. Yeah. The advertising dollars, the cost per clicks being hundreds, or it

Steve

Might be one of the highest cost per clicks of any industry period. Yeah,

Casey

Constantly shows up. I think we see some mass tort stuff sometimes, but otherwise, yeah, like truck accident, lawyer, motorcycle 

Steve

People pay a lot for a click

Casey

Because people want those leads. They want those cases. And I mean, it depends on the firm, different personal injury firms. Some personal injury firms might just say, Hey, look, we're a volume firm. We want soft tissue, these minor car accidents. But then there's other her that just want these serious injury or wrongful death cases. And obviously those strategies will differ probably a little bit, which we'll get into. But what minor ranking increases, for example, driven big results in SEO that you've seen? Like moving position five to three for example?

Steve:

It depends because yes and no. So let's talk local map pack. If you're five, you're probably getting some calls, but your phone's not blowing up.

If you're three, you're probably getting considered volume. And that's simply because on a search engine results page, it shows the top three local results

Casey

And the local pack. 

Steve

Yeah, exactly. The local pack. So that might make a big difference going from page five to page three for a deeper, but still consistently searched a long tailed term. And by long tailed, I just mean a longer search phrase that might be asking a specific question rather than that personal injury lawyer near me. Somebody might be asking, we use this a lot, but what to do after a car accident or who should I call after a truck? So maybe they're going for some more information. If you move up page five to three, you might see a very small difference, but the main difference is going to be when you get to page one.

Casey

Sure.

Steve

When you're on page one, you're going to see an incremental rise the further up you go. So you're going to see results. If you're at the bottom of page one, you're going to see more results if you're at the top of page one. I think that's,

Casey

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think one of the things we talked about in a previous episode was one of the reasons it's so hard is, well, every personal injury firm wants that number one ranking, especially probably for personal injury and car accident keywords. Because just from a volume perspective, that can't really be ignored. And I think that obviously drives up the cost of everything because kind of competing for just those couple spots like you mentioned.

Steve

Yeah, I mean the reality is personal injury case can be worth a great deal of money, and that in and of itself is going to make it competitive. They're going to want to field as many calls, many emails as they can because they know the big cases aren't necessarily the every single that's going to be the rarity. So get the call volume up and then those bigger cases are going to come naturally.

Casey

But again, it kind of depends on your strategy. The other thing too, I think one of the challenges that I see, and let me know if this is your take two, but generally speaking, if you talk to 10 SEO companies and you're saying, Hey, I want to get these cases, they're going to say, okay, well you need to rank for this keyword and this group of keywords and that's that, and then we need to create supporting content, and that's that. But there are other strategies you can do. Yeah,

Steve

Absolutely.

Casey

And that's overlooked. And before I go off too much of a tangent, I actually hate the idea of rankings in general because I don't know how wide the understanding is, but for those that don't know, if I'm searching here, and let's just say that we're in Denver right now. Let's say you're at South Denver, Steve and I'm in north Denver, and we're searching the same keyword on different devices, we're going to see different results just based on our physical location. Absolutely. And not only that, the time of day matters if our business is listed as open, potentially there's personalization factors. So I want to spend just a minute talking about your take on ranking tools because as an agency we have to report on that. People ask, and we do need benchmarks, but should that be like any sort of north star or what's your take on that?

Steve

I think you should view it more as a barometer. So if things are trending in a positive direction, that's what we're looking for.

And you have some folks who are just really, really focused on a ranking, and I can tell you right now your ranking is going to drop at some point. At some point you're going to see a keyword,

It's going to have read by it, and you dropped, maybe you came back up already. Maybe it's something that needs to be worked on or addressed, but regardless, you're going to see that drop. So focusing especially on a day-to-day aspect of am I ranking number one for this? It's just, it's futile. And I work with attorneys. I really try to get 'em to focus on that lead volume. The cases you'll find a lot of times where somebody thinks they're doing a search, well, I'm not ranking for this. 

And then I'll look and say, well, there's no search volume for that. You're the only person searching that, so it doesn't really matter because you're the only person putting that search in. Nobody else is seeing it. Also, you had 10 calls yesterday that came from somewhere search, did you answer them? Right? How did that call go? That's more important because the reality is, Casey, you might not know what they're ranking for. Maybe it's something that we're not tracking for. Maybe there's some kind of keyword or key phrase that the attorney or the SEO people they have a hit on and it's showing up and it's getting some calls. I don't want to minimize that just because I'm tracking for these five or 10 keywords that we consider kind of the big money ones, or maybe it's related to some content we put up when there might be something else out there. We don't have the data that we used to have.

I know years ago you used to be able to see what keyword turned into a case came. Yeah, that was great. You could see the whole draw. That was glory days. Those were the good times. That was great. But that data has long been hidden. So the reality is somebody could be finding you and you might have a great case, and we don't know exactly what they search unless you ask that person.

Casey

Yeah, it's funny, even though we are digital marketers and we do a lot of SEO stuff and we talk about that, the most successful firms that I continually see time and time again are the ones that are tracking those business metrics like, Hey, how much money are we making? How many cases are we signing up? They have smart goals. And then with that, you can actually set a benchmark and say, Hey, look, we can get you to this based on this number of leads we generate by this much traffic at this much conversion rate. We can walk that backwards. But if you are caught up on rankings, then you're probably going to have a lot harder time getting there.

Steve

And the other thing is, I think tying right into that, a lot of people will ask the question, how do I know if my agency or my SEO person is actually doing work? Are they doing, I'm paying this person $5,000 a month? Is he doing anything? And you need to be looking at are you getting those results or how's the timeline for those results too? What kind of timeline's been laid out for you? You need to be measuring your ROI, and it needs to be something realistic too. So you need to be familiar with what's the aver average return on a marketing spend? Is it a three x is a four x is a five x return?

And if I'm spending X amount of dollars, how many am I bringing in revenue from that?

Casey

Yeah, marketing's an investment. And I think that's one of the hard things for personal entry firms is they can't just spend 5% of their revenue in most cases and reach their growth goals other businesses might be able to get away with. You have to be spending a larger percentage of that.

It's an aggressive game.

Steve

And if you're focused on rankings and you're not focused on that, well, I know plenty of SEO companies that'll cherry pick keywords and they can rank you for 'em because again, it's something nobody else is searching for. And so if they're just showing you number one and you're saying, okay, that's good.

Casey

Or if they're giving you one ranking result and it's actually where your office is located, you're going to be number one all the time,

Steve 

Right? Yeah, exactly. It can be skewed. So if you're just looking at that, easy to manipulate, unfortunately. Yeah, exactly. 

Casey

And there's a lot of shady,

Steve

You might just be biding your time and suddenly 18 months have gone by and you've been paying and they keep showing you these rankings and you're like, wait a minute,

Casey

I'm number one, but I'm not getting cases.

Steve

I haven't really signed any cases, but they keep showing me these good rankings, what's going on? And then you've spent all this money and

You're kind of lost.

Casey

Well, that's another challenge and that's a nuance I want to talk about as well. I have two things I wanted to touch on. One is attribution. How do you know what can we track? And then I'll touch on speed to lead, I guess a little bit after that, but it's harder now. We used to be able to see what keywords have we typed in and we could trace that all the way through call tracking and everything else to the case signed. And with organic search, that's not really feasible anymore. But also I think search behaviors change where people might be doing more research, you might have multiple touch points. So it depends on what attribution model ultimately I think you're going to use and how you're going to count it. But we can track phone calls, we can track live chats, text messages, so we have enough data to be able to say like, Hey, look, these are the numbers. We're using our Google business calls. We can come up with an ROI. Right?

Steve

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the reasons that transparency is really, really important in any kind of relationship

Casey

Both ways.

Steve

Exactly, yes. Both ways. Any relationship that firm has with, even if it's an in-house person, if it's an agency, having that transparency both ways where anytime that I'm working with somebody, here's the data. I'll go into it with you. We use a tool called CallRail. We can go in and we can look at all of your phone calls. I can see what the source of that phone call is.

Hey, have you been doing another referral? You have a referral website that you're going through. Well, I can look in call rail and see how many calls you've gotten from that referral source and I could show it to you. And then on the law firm, I think it's important that you share with your agency what's your average revenue for a case? What are you making for an average case? How many of those cases do you need for this investment to be viable? And then if we have that information, the people that are working for you have somewhat, they're better equipped to do what needs to be done to get the results that you need. 

Casey

You nailed it there. I mean, whether you're working internally and have your own SEO team or you hire an agency for digital marketing, whatever route you go, you need to have that transparency. And if you don't, I think that's kind of where relationships really falter. I think you're

Steve

Where they break down

Casey

Because you don't have that transparency. And so maybe one side thinks they're doing good, but the other side's hiding that information. You wouldn't do that with your partner. Right?

Steve

Yeah. And I think you just hit the nail on the head. It's tough for, it is technically an employee I guess, but when you're working with an agency, viewing them as a partner rather than another employee can make a world of difference and the experience and the results that you get.

Casey

But I mean, it's so much easier to tie people to goals of talking that and then you can very clearly make an evaluation. This is working or it's not working. Right, exactly. Because the reality is everybody, it's happened to me. I was like, Hey, I want to go after this. This is our goal. This is how we're going to do it, and this is what we expect to happen, but maybe for whatever reason it didn't work out that way. And we need to be able to have those, every agency, anybody in an agency or in-house need to be able to have those conversations with the stakeholders, like the good, the bad, the ugly so that you can pivot and reach those goals, keep that north star I think in mind of what your smart goal is and always work towards that.

Steve

I think that's really important and I think that you can see progress even if you're not. That's one of the big challenges that we face with the SEO aspect, particularly of that part of digital marketing. It can take a long time to see results,

Casey

Not overnight,

Steve

To see dividends. So if you're working with somebody and you're in only the first or second month and you're expecting to see a big ROI already, I think that you need to kind of pump the brakes a little bit and you need to take into account the fact that your first, however long of spend is going to be recouped when you sign those first.

Casey

Well, it's an investment, right? Exactly. You're not going to put money in the stock market today and get a hundred percent return tomorrow.

Steve

Precisely.

Casey

I think that's something that kind of goes overlooked sometimes. But to be fair, there's other things that can be going on. You could be competing. You could be participating in pay-per-click and SEO, and you could be getting leads and you could still not be signing cases, even though we're tracking 'em all the way to there. And the thing that I wanted to touch on a bit earlier was speed to lead, because one thing that I found is that people are not within that first minute. Number one, some firms don't answer all of their calls. Number two, people sometimes get emails and it takes them hours or days or longer to respond, which is insane. People are shopping

Steve

Or their emails don't come in and they don't say anything for a week.

Casey

Exactly, yep. Stuff like you've been there, you've seen all of that.

And what I've seen is the most successful firms actually have something else in common, and that that speed's lead is quick. It's instantaneously. If you call, I answer if you email, I respond under a minute, like fast, fast, fast. But not only that, their intake is really dialed in, and I don't know if you've seen this or not. We've never talked about this, but an observation that I've had is when I work with firms that have a very solid intake process where they can sign a case, the actual intake person can sign that case without it going through the attorney and taking more time and more roadblocks, we see a higher percentage of closing. It's that speed thing. Have you experienced anything like that?

Steve

It is truly amazing how often I'll see, I'll hear again. One of the SEO teams might come to me and say, Hey, we have this client, they're ranking, they got 150 phone calls last month, and they tell me they're not really signing any cases. And my advice to the team lead to the person running that account is to really go listen to the phone calls. That's our job. If we care about the results, we wouldn't be amazed. But one might be amazed by the lack of answering of the phone, the calls that go missed or they get answered by answering machine or something like that in the middle of the day. Or they have an intake person who is not engaged. Dismissive sometimes.

Casey

Yeah,

Steve

Or sometimes not really through a fault of their own, but just not equipped to handle the phone call. And they might try to pass it on to an attorney. The attorney's busy, they're doing something, they're away somewhere. That's a lost opportunity every time. And so I think it's extremely, extremely, it's imperative to have your intake dialed in. You got to

Casey

Dial that in,

Steve

Yup. Whether you need to hire an answering service to make sure that you're constantly answering the phone

Casey

And then continually vet them because sometimes

Steve

Check in on them, they suck, have people call in and report to it and be involved with this process. It's just like it's not ronco set it and forget it. It's never that you have a script that they read. You have a script that your internal employees read. You go through that script with them for practice when they're not, this is something a lot of times people are hiring somebody with little to no experience. They're answering the phone, so they might not be paying 'em a huge salary to do this, and then they're also not giving any training and they're kind of missing how vital that's business of their businesses. So you have somebody who is the first person who's talking to your potential clients, potential customers,

Casey

My first experience with your company

Steve:

And you're treating them, they're kind of the lowest employee on the totem pole maybe really they're one of the most important employees. 

Casey

Yeah. It's so important.

Steve

The more you can treat that person like that, they're important and invest in that person, the better the results are going to be long term. Like you said, eventually they're going to be that one signing a client for you before you even talk to 'em. And they're going to be coming to you and saying, Hey, Mrs. Attorney, I have a meeting scheduled with a new client. They're coming in Monday, and it becomes a lot easier for you. Now you're suddenly not investing so much time and legwork into signing up that client because you've got people trained to do

Casey

That. I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm really good at learning lessons the hard way. And so thinking about process, another thing that a lot of the most successful firms have in common is that process, the training that you talked about, but also that process for intake. I was talking to Yani Smith, the founder of Legal Intake Pros about that as well. This very thing, and it's just so key, but it is for some reason, overlooked where people think, Hey, we need to dive right into marketing dollars, but maybe they don't have a marketing problem even. It could just be they have another problem, which is they're not returning those calls fast enough or whatever.

Steve

If you have, and granted, a lot of the phone calls that we end up tracking are going to be, it's another lawyer calling you. It's an insurance company looking for something, and those are going to get tracked. But in general, if I look at and I see that you had a thousand phone calls come in over a year from organic search, and then you tell me, I signed one case. There's a problem with your intake system.

Casey

There is absolutely a hundred percent.

Steve

There's something broken.

Casey

But those phone numbers should be different anyway. The one you hand out and email.

Steve

True. Sometimes what I see happening is people go Google it, so they Google it, and that's how it comes to organic search. And they say, I need to call him about this form. I Googled it, he came up on organic search. Now I called him and it'll track. And so that's a big complaint I hear too, if I'm talking to

Casey

No, that makes sense.

Steve

Return. They'll say, oh, a lot of those calls are just existing clients or this person and they went through and that's fair, but if the call volume's high enough, that doesn't matter.

Casey

No, that's true.

Steve

I see plenty of firms that are hitting that thousand a year and more, and they're signing way more than one or two cases from it.

Casey

And some of it too is, this is another problem that personal injury firms have is they do cast that net too wide. I've seen it where they, let's say that they only want car accident motorcycle cases, but because they're trying to cast that wider net, maybe they add some med mal or dog bites or whatever that is, but they're not actually taking those cases. And I've seen the opposite effect too, where intake people get bogged down by irrelevant leads. What's your take on that?

Steve

I think that that's really good advice, especially for somebody who is trying to break into a market. So there's somebody who, right now they're kind of existing off referrals and then they're paying the bills, they're making some money, but they're really relying on somebody they know, giving them a lead or another Attorney that they've worked with, feeding them a lead. An effective strategy about with what you're saying is to focus on something,

And maybe it's something that you don't love, but you're going to build up to being able to broaden your horizons. You're going to be able to build up to that. If you focus on slip and falls and you become that slip and fall expert, it's going to be easier to rank you for that. And then when those people are looking for those specific cases, you're going to come up higher. It's easier to make you rank up higher for that, and you're going to develop that expertise and you can snowball that into more growth later. You start to get those cases. Now I can reinvest in marketing and I can start to go after some of the more competitive terms and

Casey

Different problems for different size firms too, like a smaller firm. They'd probably take that approach and say, Hey, look, we can build up to that. But I've seen the other side too where bigger firms are like, Hey, we need to just cut all of this stuff because it's irrelevant in tying up the intake staff.

So, I don't know if you've seen that.

Steve

I've worked with firms that do just medical malpractice and they have personal injury stuff and they've had to, they do, they optimize a little bit and pull a little bit away from that and focus more on that main thing that they're really looking for. Because they're in medical malpractice, they're really only looking for a few meetings a year because signing one or two medical malpractice cases for those who don't know, so they're really just looking for a few good meetings and they don't want all that extra, it's all noise if they get a bunch of stuff. Well,

All we do with a truck accident case is we kick that over to somebody else down the road.

Casey

Sure.

Steve

So really focusing on that main thing that you do is essential there.

Casey

Yeah, and it's interesting, obviously we already do this with forms and whatnot, but where you can qualify leads before they come in. Where are you in an accident? You hospitalized? Did you go to the hospital or was this within the last two years? Whatever it is. Those questions, one of the things I'm seeing now is, I dunno if you're paying attention to the AI voice agents and things like that, you can create these agents where it can have a real conversation with you in real time to qualify that lead. I wonder if we're going to see any of that kind of hit legal or people are going to think that's too sensitive. I haven't seen it yet. That's why I ask.

Steve

Well, I've seen, even a couple years ago, I worked with someone who would sign up a case through, and I can't remember what the service is called right now, but it's kind of like really evolved chat. And it'll go as far as it'll send 'em the documents to sign over 

Chat and they'll sign. I haven't met too many attorneys who are honestly interested in it, but this one particular attorney, she used it

Casey

Well, now you can build that, Yeah.

Steve

And would just sign cases that way from not even talking to anybody at the firm at all. They talked to a chat bot and got the paperwork.

Casey

I mean the automation, there's so much room for efficiency from all parts of a business for a personal injury firm that would really take advantage of automation like these different steps or sending out letters for the actual business. I mean, it's going to be the wild west here the next few years I think.

Steve

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It's uncharted territory.

Casey

It is. Yeah. So I mean, all that's evolving so fast, but another thing I want to touch on real quickly is for legal directories and your take on that, so there's avo, there's fine law, there's super lawyers, and again, everybody's kind of paying, some people are paying for those top spots that barnacle, sio we were talking about, I think previously being listed in more spaces. Have you seen any advantages to being listed in those or are they kind of a waste of time?

Steve

Well, at the risk of getting blacklisted from super lawyers and avo, I would not spend too much money getting to the top of their listings.

It's another layer of click, right? Somebody has to click into avo, then click, click here. Now I still would invest in getting listed.

Casey

You should get listed. Absolutely. 

Steve

I agree. Agree with that. You should get listed if you're already doing it and it works for you, great. I have not seen very much evidence that it's really incredibly effective.

Casey

I remember a few years ago I interviewed 20 attorneys that were doing Yelp advertising and all of them, except for one, he did it. They were like this.

Yeah, it works for the person that comes up one all the time.

Casey

Yeah, I guess so.

Steve

You know what I mean? And I think that they're going to prioritize the person who's spending more money too with them, and they like their dollars. Remember they've got full control over who's coming up on their website first. You're in charge of it, so are you willing to pay the most and are you're going to get that traffic. But for numerous attorneys, I've tracked, and they might get a couple of phone calls in a course of a year from one of those referral sites.

Casey

And that brings me to another challenge here. I think the other problem that I've seen a lot of firms make, and I've seen it happen really bad ways, and I've seen it happen other ways, but one of a really bad way is just putting all your eggs in one basket. I also tell attorneys, you should not do only SEO is your only marketing channel. We are not in charge of Google. You can do everything and you can still lose visibility.

Steve

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's one of those things that, again, many years ago it was a little bit more of a, I take this brand new firm, do a couple things and have a good chance of getting 'EM ranked, get a case and snowballs. Whereas now, you should be multichannel for anything. And that's not just digital, but multichannel and digital and you should be and building your brand, right, what you can. Yeah. Yeah. Branding and doing what you can as far as advertising goes in your local area.

Casey

Well anyway, local, SEO organic SEO paid search, if you have the budget for it, you should do all of that. That's kind of like a good digital presence. But then you're kind of thinking about barnacle, SEO too, being listed on all these different directories, making sure you're everywhere people are searching. That's kind of also feed through to sources like chat, GPT, getting listed on best lists, building a brand. There's so many different avenues that you can take, and I'm not really sure where I was going with that other than diversify.

Steve

It is tough because especially for you're a new personal injury firm starting out and you want to get some leads and you might not have the money to invest in LSA and PPC in SEO and doing physical media,

Casey

We've been established firms like they can run into that same issue. The cost per clicks

Steve

Could be a budget issue. So then it becomes about how do you best allocate and how do you start the ball rolling? Because if I can do a couple of those things, and this is where we get back into that niching down, you might need to niche down into something because if you niche down on PPC, it's going to be a lot easier. If I'm only going for dog bite clicks,

Casey

You can really speak to your customer. You can use a StoryBrand approach and talk to them in that exact situation as opposed to a general personal injury landing page.

Steve

Exactly. And then I can, again, we can build back up to that spot where I do have a marketing budget and I do have the confidence to, okay, I'm going to start advertising here. I'm going to put more into my SEO, I'm going to put more into the PPC. You can build up. It needs to be a snowball effect. I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not the end of the world if you don't have the money to invest in everything right now. You can start small, build up that snowball, but it needs to be in the back of your mind that I'm trying to grow to the point where I am spending marketing dollars on physical media. I am spending it on PPC, I'm spending LSA, I'm spending it on SEO, I'm diversifying. So it just needs to be a goal, I guess, even if you're starting smaller than that.

Casey

Sure. Yeah. And you've got to be careful, right? There's a business case to be made that says, Hey, you should probably should put most of your dollars to what you know is working and you shouldn't just kind of half-ass TikTok and half ass Instagram and half 10 half ass efforts are not going to get you any cases. So you also don't want to take all your budget from something that's working and diversify it over there. So there's a lot of ways to go about it, but I think generally speaking, it's like, Hey, let's spend 80% of what we know is working and if we want to know or try another channel, let's do 20%, but let's go all in on that. Let's do it. Well,

Steve

Yeah, absolutely. Don't lose focus on what your main source of leads is, but be willing to try that, try to diversify and try some

Casey

For sure.

Steve

Some different things. And it's funny you brought up the TikTok and the Instagram and

A lot of the attorneys you see on there are an archetype or a personality type and they're kind of playing a character. Is that something that you want to do? I need a character. That's what I want to do. Is it something that you want to do long term? Do you want to be whatever the DUI guy on Instagram or something like that?

Casey

It's easy to get people like to do business with who they know and trust, and it's easy to get known if you are just doing that one thing

Steve

And it's just something to think about. It's going to be energy and effort and a lot of time to do something like that.

Casey

No, it's not easy. Otherwise, everybody would do it. Everybody's hoping to just have these AI bots that are going to go out and do all of this very well for them, but I think we're ways off from that, even though there are a lot of efficiencies to be gained.

Steve

Yeah, it'll be coming here soon enough.

Casey

The last thing I kind of want to touch on for this episode was just we haven't talked much about local SEO, which I normally am just blabbering on about local SEO, but I haven't done at all today reviews and process basically. What is your thought? Do you have any strategies for established law firms that they can go and continue to get reviews? We know those are important not only for local SEO and the developments that are changing in local SEO. It's simple.

Steve

I think it is be friendly and be approachable. When you're an attorney, you're busy. Say you do have a lot of clients that you're working with, I think it's really important to make sure you add that personal touch

That they know you or they know an attorney at the firm. You know what I mean? Depending on the size of the firm and things like that. I think that it's just really important to keep that human aspect of it and then ask for the reviews. If you provided a good experience, which I think any business owner, their aim should be whoever their client or their customer is, they need to be really focused on presenting them with a good experience and not just seeing that person a number. I mean, and that can be like, oh, this is a big car accident case. 

I'm going to make sure my client's taken care of first of all, but I also know I'm going to make money off of this also, rather than just viewing them as that number and that kind of transactional. If you can find a way to be personal and make it a memorable experience, just like any other business, it's going to be so much easier to leave review. If you go to a restaurant and the food's really good, but somebody, they barely talk to you and they're a little dismissive, you're not going to necessarily leave a bad review, but you're not going to go leave a good review.

Whereas if you go in, they treat you like you're the only person in the restaurant, even though it's packed and they're just super nice and really accommodating and they make the experience memorable.

Casey

It's like Linea versus McDonald's.

Steve

Yeah, I'm going to go throw it on. I'm going to throw it on Google and I'm going to put the review out there without them even asking. No,

Casey

That's a good point.

Steve

Be personal and then also don't be afraid to ask. Don't ask for a five star review. Just ask for a review.

Casey

And Steve, you make a very good point there. I think that a lot of times people get too caught up in marketing and in some cases you see them lose track of the business. I remember working with a not so kind personal injury attorney in Southern California, and every day he had to fight for his business to get those new leads in because not a lot of people were referring him. He didn't really treat people with respect. Exactly. I do know one of the attorneys that left that firm, and we don't keep in touch, but I follow him on social media and I see he's built a business without really doing a lot of marketing or maybe not even any other than just really going out of his way to help people and giving him that level of attention. And then that referral and that good result, and that is cyclical. It's going to come back, keeps on coming back and growing that way, and that might not be the pace that other people want to grow at. They might have different growth goals, that's fine, but it speaks to exactly what you're saying. Run a good business, do good for people, and it's all going to kind of come back to you.

Steve

I agree a hundred percent.

Casey

Anyway, Steve, thank you so much for joining me today. Is there anything you want to leave our audience with before we head out today?

Steve

I don't have anything major, but thanks for having me. First of all. I definitely had a good time. Anytime, and I think the biggest takeaway from this is that you can do it. Yeah, you can do it. I talked to a lot of people and they feel like, I can't compete with these big guys. There's Morgan and Morgan out there. 

Casey

There's always a space in there.

Steve

A lot of tigers. But yeah, you can get in there, you can find a specialty. You can start to rank, you can start to get traction, and

If you start investing now five years from now, you're going to be glad that you started now.

Casey

Absolutely.

Steve

I think one of the biggest things. 

Casey

Yeah, you can do it. Just nail the right strategy. Don't necessarily go after the exact same thing everybody's going after, just slightly to the side. Be different, be good. We see the success in this industry all the time. So 2025 doesn't even matter. Nope. And beyond.

Steve

Nope. Yep, you can do it.

Casey

All right. Well, I'm thinking of, what is that movie? The Water Boy Now, and Rob Schneider.

Steve

 You can do it. You can do it,

Casey

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining me today, Steve.

Steve

Yeah, Thanks Casey.

Casey

 Take care.