Jon Robinson:

The best $1,000 that you will spend every single month is making sure that you protect your own brand.

Chris Dreyer:

Everyone’s conditioned to spent 50 to $100,000 a month on TV and they know they got to be in the top three. They also understand that it’s going to take a year to work to improve their brand for TV. Where is the disconnect on digital? If you deployed that 50 to $100,000 in Google ads, you would’ve immediate success.

Jon Robinson:

It’s just not really changing the types of cases you’re getting, but giving you opportunity to get more for the same spend.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite legal marketing agency. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. On these special Toolkit Tuesdays, we dive deep in the conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technologies, services and strategies that help law firms not just survive but thrive in today’s competitive landscape. Now, this isn’t about selling you the latest software or getting kickbacks from affiliate links. It’s about bringing you the best so you can be the best for your firm, for your staff, for your clients, and for you. This is Toolkit Tuesday on PIM, your weekly guide to staying sharp in the legal world. Let’s get started.

With cutthroat competition and saturated markets, simply keeping up can feel like an uphill battle. Digital marketing evolves at blinding speed. To gain an edge over the competition and accelerate growth and offers clarity on why SEO is a game of patience that ultimately unlocks a massive payout. Here’s Jon Robinson, SVP of Digital Media At CAMG.

Jon Robinson:

I was looking on Craigslist and I wound up figuring out in 2011, internet marketing was sort of coming of age and there was a big opportunity there. Wound up taking a position with a company in Orlando and it was called Launch That or at the time it was called the Asbestos and Mesothelioma Awareness group and they said, “Hey, we like your entrepreneurial background. We want to start up another website. Do you want to come aboard? We’ll teach you all the digital stuff. You can build out a new business unit for us.”

Chris Dreyer:

I did the same thing for Craigslist. Around that same exact period is how I got into digital. I was doing some affiliate marketing. The one company you launched that and from that I had the experience you worked at Litify, you’re the VP of growth. I love the naming conventions for a lot of their stuff. You got LitiCast, Litify, LitiQuest and now you’re at Consumer Attorney Marketing Group. You went very quickly from VP of SEO to senior VP of digital, so tell me about how the roles have changed and how that trajectory at CAMG.

Jon Robinson:

The CAMG, obviously we’re talking mostly to people in the legal industry on this podcast and people know us for traditional media marketing, direct response TV commercials. When I was at LitiCast, I had met Chris Princess, who you also know at CAMG. We became friends and we toyed around with the idea of expanding CAMG’s offerings into digital. The world was changing. This was 2019. We really started to see this shift of traditional media being, I don’t want to say less effective, but really going toe to toe with digital in terms of being able to generate cases for law firms and I felt that the company was remiss to not take advantage of that opportunity and I thought from my background in SEO and in digital that I could help build out a division at CAMG that took advantage of that ongoing transition from traditional to digital or at least complimenting traditional with digital.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, I see that change too and the TV even shifting over to OTT and a lot more streaming. I know that’s kind of fragmented and it’s kind of the Wild West with Roku and Hulu and all the different platforms to buy on, but I guess on the digital side, kicking off topic number one, the elephant in the room, AI and SGE, what’s kind of your thoughts on it, how it’s going to impact search, just your general big picture, your thoughts on it.

Jon Robinson:

I think this is a very interesting time for people like you and I, Chris to be involved in digital marketing and right now we’re recording this in June. I don’t know when people are going to wind up listening to it, but I guarantee that the things that we’re talking about today will have improved upon exponentially by the time people actually listen to this. And that really is the biggest thing that people need to take into account when they’re looking at AI is that it is moving so quickly and every day it is becoming incrementally better, exponentially improving upon itself and the data that it’s able to crunch, it was an elephant in the room. It’s not anymore. Now it is. How can you leverage it? Not if you can leverage it.

Chris Dreyer:

It’s a tool. It’s a tool to enhance productivity. It’s just going to change the game. I guess in my beta testing what I’ve seen is your money, your life space isn’t triggering Bard as frequently. Now it still triggers it very frequently on the new search engine. I think there’s a little bit of space there in terms of top of funnel, but I think that space will start to diminish and I guess for me, I’m looking at search as more of a bottom up approach now instead of a top down funnel. What are just some of the things that you think it’s going to impact just right away or is already.

Jon Robinson:

Like you, I’ve applied for the labs access to Google’s SSG experience, so I’ve been testing it a lot and one of the things I’m noticing is that it is changing every single day. So if you run a query today and I run a query today, yes, we’re in different locations, but it’s just iterating upon itself so much and the results are not the same and obviously it’s still in beta, so the tweaks that the engineers are making based on the feedback with people like you and I, it’s adjusting what’s resulting there. So it’s definitely not ready for prime time yet for sure, but the biggest observation I’ve had in our space has been that the impact of having a physical location is becoming and more and more important. It was important before with the Map Pack, but now if you look at a lawyer based query in a geo or with a geo modifier, you are getting results that are heavily impacted by physical locations, visibility within the Google business profile.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. And I think in turn that changes the game on reviews, right? Because you’re going to see reviews and being aggregated from multiple sources more so than even on Google’s current search. I want to kind of change the subject a little bit over to your presentation at NTL. I thought it was an amazing presentation you had on cheat codes for lawyers on how to make an impact and I know you’ve updated it. That was in January and we’re moving at quantum leaps here. One of your slides was on underserved practice areas. Could you expound on that and what you mean?

Jon Robinson:

Any lawyer in a market that has a presence in a local market and is trying to generate cases within a specific practice area has to look either deeper within that practice area for sort of sub niches. So if we’re talking about medical malpractice, there’s a lot of different types. There’s cancer misdiagnosis, there’s anesthesia error, there’s birth injury. Going deeper into a practice area in your market and understanding what is the competition like for those specific sub practice areas can give you a treasure trove of opportunity.

I’ll just continue using the medical malpractice example. It may that medical malpractice may be extremely competitive in your market, but maybe there’s white space in birth injuries or in cancer misdiagnosis. So at its highest level, what I was presenting is that there are opportunities that you need to really research and identify within your market, but if you kind of really dig in and this is an exercise that takes some time and research and you look at your market competitiveness across every type of case that you can take, you may find that there are multiple opportunities that may be less competitive, less expensive, and open up opportunities for you to generate cases at more efficient cost per acquisition.

Chris Dreyer:

Let’s take this a little bit further. Most of our audiences is going to be doing motor vehicle accidents. Is there a way to even sub niche in the auto? I know we’ve seen it with Joe Fried and Trucking and David Craig and individuals like that. What about sub-niches of auto?

Jon Robinson:

Yeah, I mean there’s motorcycle, there’s truck and there’s car accident and everyone really wants to go after that same group of cases. I think when you’re looking at the higher volume litigation, so personal injury motor vehicle, let’s just talk about that. I think then it becomes an exercise in underserved or overserved geographic locations and this dovetails into something that I had talked about with regards to targeting within a DMA but not necessarily centered on a downtown.

So one of the things that I find really effective is when you’re running Google Ads, for instance, let’s talk about I’m in Orlando, do you target the Orlando Daytona DMA or do you target that DMA but exclude the downtown of Daytona and the downtown of Orlando within a one-mile radius because you don’t care if you get a case that’s a mile away or you get a case that’s downtown, but everybody is really hyper focusing on centering their proximity-based geotargeting on a downtown city. So these are like those little cheat codes that I was talking about that are in technology, we call them growth hacks, right? Little things that you test out and figure out ways that can make your campaigns incrementally more successful. So that’s something that I think people can look at in motor vehicles. Look at your market. If you have attorneys licensed across the state, are there pockets where you can get motor vehicle cases that are still within your state? You’re going to litigate them the same way but just aren’t as competitive to acquire?

Chris Dreyer:

I guess that’s one of the biggest challenge when doing Google Ads is wrapping just a radius around the downtown. You’re going to get those exponential fees versus doing the entire state or even the nation and really dropping those costs down and then not even mentioning the other strategies on different demos. Maybe it’s Spanish or whoever.

Jon Robinson:

Yeah, the idea of excluding as opposed to including I think is an underutilized tactic. When you layer I want to include an entire stake but exclude a specific city or multiple cities or radius within a city, it’s just not really changing the types of cases you’re getting, but giving you opportunity to get more for the same spend.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, absolutely. I guess that dovetails into the underspending and overspending DMAs and that is its own being an amazing data point. I hear a lot of the East coast, the Florida attorneys are upset about the tort reform and they’re looking at markets to go into. I would imagine that looking at that slide would be something pretty powerful. What’s your thoughts on the underspending and overspending DMAs?

Jon Robinson:

So for those of you who are watching or listening to this, what Chris is referring to is the data that we produce on a monthly basis in CAMG’s legal marketing index, which is free data and anyone can go online and utilize this. We produce a single event legal marketing index and a mass tort legal marketing index, and because we run so many campaigns all across the country, we’re able to anonymize and aggregate this data and provide resources for people to really understand what’s going on either in an individual practice area or within an individual market. This is the best part of my presentations when I bring this up, is I put all the markets up on the screen, I show these are the top 20 underspending and the top 20 overspending DMAs and I call out some of the markets, say, “Hey, does anyone have a firm in one of these overspending or underspending markets, and tell me what’s going on in the market?”

Portland, Oregon for some reason is always at the top on the list in underspending DMAs, and I posed this question at PILMMA, why do people think that Portland is such an underspending market? So when we talk about underspending, we’re looking at the total spend in media divided by the population. So you wind up coming up with a per capita spend, and in Portland, Oregon, the per capita spend is 21 cents. If you look at the flip side of this and the most overspent EMA, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, $21, so we’re talking about 21 cents versus $21 per person if you’re doing your advertising. You could talk about saturation competition. There are a number of things that can come into account when you’re looking at the overspending markets, but on the underspending side, I think there are things that you really have to think about specifically why each individual market is underspending.

I think that the laws, you were talking about tort reform in Florida, I think we’re going to wind up seeing some of the Florida markets start creeping in here, but the laws in Oregon aren’t necessarily the most friendly. You don’t see firms that have a presence outside of Oregon saying, “Hey, I’m going to go move into Portland because it’s such a friendly market.” People have talked about exploring it just because of a cost perspective with some of the data that we’ve shared, but that’s one thing. Are the laws within the state or city worth expanding your practice into? The next is just from a competition perspective. You look at the other firms that are in a market, are there tactics not as say advanced as some tactics that you’re seeing in some of the more aggressive west coast, northeast, southeast markets. Adoption of new ways of marketing may not be as prevalent. So each one is really unique. I think you have to dive into each market and look at the landscape to truly understand what’s going on.

Chris Dreyer:

It’s always amazing to hear that, and I would think that maybe some of those downsides of the laws would be if you can get more buy on your ad spend and you’re the only one that stands out, maybe that kind of makes up for it and make some of these a little bit more appealing. One thing that I find really interesting is a topic on capitalization. A lot of times even from a search perspective, they’re like, “Oh, SEO doesn’t work.” Well, my budget was $1,00 a month because some SEO agency took that thousand dollars a month in a major market or they’re trying to do Google Ads at $5,000 a month. Where does capitalization fit into all this and properly allocating the amount of money to invest into a channel?

Jon Robinson:

That’s a great question. I think you and I have similar conversations with our clients and with potential clients around this topic. Generally speaking, in motor vehicle case, if we look at across the country, is going to cost somewhere around 2,500, $3,000 a case. You look at more of the competitive markets, maybe $4,000 a case, it could even go north of that. If you can identify a channel where you can generate cases under that benchmark in your market or even nationwide, I think you’ve identified a good channel, but is it truly scalable? PPC, Google Ads, scalable. SEO, scalable. I don’t know if some of these things that may be able to generate a one-off case here or there at low cost are truly scalable. Most firms that are working with your organization or mine are looking to generate dozens of cases incrementally a month, not a single case. There aren’t many channels out there that are truly touching so many people that may be in need of an attorney that you can get cases at volume and at cost that are acceptable to law firms.

Chris Dreyer:

I see the exact same thing and that’s why a lot of the big players back in the day, because TV was the thing, right? The digital didn’t have the impact it has now, and those individuals blew up because they had distribution and they could scale. One of the things I’ve seen even on the Google Ads side. So just touching on that because we know there’s a huge market there, it’s capturing existing demand. It’s the core search engine. Where does things like Performance Max fit in where… And the reason I’m asking this is because I’m sure many of you listening, if you’ve done Google Ads have received Morgan and Morgan’s cease and desist to quit bidding on their name and add their name as a negative keyword. But the thing is with Performance Max, if you don’t do an account based level negative keyword, you’re going to be bidding on people’s names. So where does that fit in? Is that ethical? How do you think of that? Because we know you can get cases cheaper from that tactic.

Jon Robinson:

Okay. We always advise our clients not to bid on competitors. You are effectively starting a relationship off with a bait and switch. You’re making it harder on your intake team to try and convert that lead. You’re always going to have the concept of you know they were looking for someone else, so you better do everything possible that you can to make sure that you are handling this case exactly right, because at the first opportunity that something goes wrong, they may realize like, “Oh, well, I did go with firm Y and I was looking for firm Z. Maybe I should just go back to firm Z.” So there’s the sort of offline non-marketing component of this that always needs to be taken into account. Purely from a marketing perspective, yes, you can target another brand and you could wind up getting leads at a lower cost. You can also target your own brand and get leads at a lower cost.

So the first thing that I always say before someone starts investing in non-brand pay-per-click is the best $1,00 that you will spend every single month is making sure that you protect your own brand. Because Google Ads algorithms are going to give you a lower cost per click than the competitors who are trying to bid on your brand. They cannot put your brand in their ads. That is not something that they can do. They can show up for your keywords, but they can’t actually show ads that show your brand, so they’re using the fact that they can bid extremely high for your brand to try and jump over you. All you have to do is just protect yourself and do the right things and it costs you effectively nothing in the big scheme of things from a defensive mechanism. From an offensive standpoint, I just think it’s bad business because if you are going to do this to another firm, they’re just going to do it to you and you’re going to go back and forth. It’s just, again, we go back to scalable tactics. Is that really a scalable tactics?

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah and on… So staying on the capitalization and kind of strategies, because that is a strategy we’ve seen. Legion companies and other companies that sell leads that they do, they do that, right and it’s well-known. Is when you’re looking at just a standard market and you’re thinking about Google ads, you said $2,500 a case average could be in California, maybe four or five grand or higher spend. If we’re just looking at that $2,500 case acquisition, what type of economies are you looking at? Are you looking at a minimum 25,000? If we’re trying to guide the PI attorneys here, what would be a minimum of investment? You would say, “Hey, if I’m going to play in this channel, this is what I’m looking at.” For SEO, I tell most people it’s at least 10,000. If you’re in PI, there’s some exceptions, but in most cases it’s at least 10,000. What are we looking at from a Google Ads perspective?

Jon Robinson:

Well, it becomes a numbers game, right? Before we talk about the business of law and the acquisition cost of a quality case, purely look at the numbers and let’s do some math. If a cost per click is going to wind up being, I don’t know, $100, $200, how many clicks are you actually getting? If you’re only spending a thousand bucks or 2000 bucks, you could wind up saying, “Oh, this tactic doesn’t work.” Well, if you look at the data, it’s because you didn’t actually spend enough to get an incremental case. You have to look at this purely from a numbers game. How much money do you need to deploy to assume your conversion rates on your landing pages are taken into account? Your click-through rates are taken into account, your conversion rate of your intake team taken into account. Those are things people don’t normally think about when they’re having this conversation.

It’s just, “Well, my budget is X and you’re telling me the cost per case is Y. Why can’t I just do simple division?” Not that simple. I usually recommend a minimum $25,000 a month, and it depends on the market, in the PI space. That number changes. When you talk about firms that only accept catastrophic cases, obviously your cost per acquisition goes up, you have to deploy more dollars to truly understand where your cost per acquisition is going to be based on your acceptance criteria. And then you get into different litigations of course have different dollar amounts on them, but just as a rule of thumb, 25,000 on pay per-click, and I’ll echo your sentiment. $10,000 at an absolute minimum on the SEO side, and I will say this publicly that I talk to firms all the time and if they tell me they are working with you guys, I tell them, “Great. You’re in great hands.”

Many times they’re coming to us because they haven’t had success. So I don’t see a lot of firms coming to us that have worked with you guys, but when we do, we tell them they’re in great hands. The situations that a lot of firms find themselves in, and again, you probably come across this a lot, is that they’re spending two or $3,000 a month on SEO, account manager that they’re dealing with is managing 30, 40, 50, 60 accounts. And how much attention could you really be getting when you’re spending two or $3,000 a month knowing that SEO is not just writing a blog post and walking away. You’ve got link building, you’ve got content creation, you’ve got development, you’ve got design, you’ve got the actual SEO skills, you spread the few thousand dollars across all those disciplines and you wind up effectively spending a few hundred dollars here, a few hundred dollars there. The numbers don’t work.

Chris Dreyer:

On the follow-up question of that, and first, thank you for that, Jon. That’s really nice to hear.

Jon Robinson:

Of course.

Chris Dreyer:

And what do you think the disconnect is? I love this topic about capitalization because a lot of SEO specialists are not trying to be unethical. It’s a Dun and Kruger effect. They underestimate the amount of capital they need to deploy for an area like PI or some of these super competitive divorce or criminal defense. The question I have here is at what point, how do we make this case for digital? When everyone’s conditioned to spend 150 to $100,000 a month on TV and they know they got to be in the top three, they will spend 50,000, a hundred thousand dollars all month, and they also understand that it’s going to take a year to work to improve their brand for TV. Where is the disconnect on digital? I don’t understand it because if you deployed that 50 to 100,000 in Google Ads, you would’ve immediate success versus the year that it’s going to take for TV to start to have an impact. Now, I know there’s benefits of direct response versus brand, but our brand versus direct response, but where is that disconnect?

Jon Robinson:

I love this question. Thank you for asking this. This is something that is pretty much unique to the legal industry. If you really think about it, would a commerce brand and not even a commerce brand, E-commerce brand is just kind of what we talk about all retail brands now, would they ever think in a million years that I could spend so much more money on TV and have more effectiveness than by using digital mechanisms? Absolutely not. What we are dealing with in our industry is that, and it’s not just in marketing, the legal industry is consistently five to 10 years behind in technology adoption. We see it in CRM systems, we see it in marketing tactics. We see it in operations. It’s just how the legal industry works. Why is that the case? Well, there’s not a lot of turnover in law firms because it’s not like a traditional business where you have a board and you have an executive team and they are necessarily potentially accountable to the numbers.

It’s the founder, it’s the managing partner, and they’ve been that founder or managing partner for the lifetime of the firm. The things that they have used traditionally or the things that they know, TV is one of those things. So I have used TV for decades. It has always worked for me. Why would it not work now? That’s one point.

The second is that what you and I deal with is it’s a highly technical discipline, and when you try and take someone who understands that I can deploy X amount of dollars on TV and that yields Y. Versus now we’re going to talk about, we’ll go back to content and link building and development and design and conversion rate optimization. All of those things have to be explained when you’re talking about the value proposition of digital versus traditional. It’s just an easier thing to understand when you talk about deploying money on TV or radio versus deploying it on digital. However, I see that as an advantage to firms that actually are able to adopt some of these newer technologies because you are getting one step ahead of these other firms that are taking five to 10 years to make that transition.

Chris Dreyer:

I know technology really advanced during COVID. That was one of the big advantages for myself and being a remote company, it’s like, “Hey, everyone knows how to use Zoom now.” And because before that just to adopt that was a challenge, and even social has distribution. It’s more challenging to target and be seen on an organic perspective. So I think… What’s your thoughts on just briefly on social, because there’s a lot of talk, there’s TikTok, there’s Reels, shorts, everything’s kind of shifting the conversation there.

Jon Robinson:

So I’m going to split this into two distinct points. Let’s talk about the organic side. I had this conversation with one of our clients last week. They said, what can we do to be an influencer in legal like we’re seeing in other industries? And my response was, those people who are influencers, that is their job. If you are willing to stop doing law or to devote someone within your practice to not focus on law and focus on being an influencer, that is how you gain organic reach and you’re going to get cases and get exposure that way. You cannot do it as a side project. It will not work. That is how you can actually do this. I don’t know if any firms are willing to take that leap. I’ve seen individuals do it. You see a lot of solo practitioners who are seeing it as a way to really advance their practice in markets that are hyper-competitive because they’re willing to put the work in and they can’t necessarily spend the same dollars that a Morgan and Morgan would put in to get that recognition.

So on the organic side, you really have to go all in. That’s the biggest piece of feedback that I can give there. And also stay abreast of the constantly changing landscape of Instagram and TikTok and how their algorithms work because it is not static. The flip side is on the paid side. I think that we can take a page out of other industries books here and look at what works. So something that we’ve been doing and testing over the past, let’s say nine-ish months, is looking at how influencers show up within people’s social media feeds as people are doom scrolling on their phone. People stop more often at videos that are moving as you scroll. Thankfully, Facebook and Instagram, they auto play videos within your feed. Now, I look at my wife and I hope she’s not listening to this. I look at my wife and how she’s scrolling and she’ll see someone who’s wearing some clothes or talking about jewelry or makeup, and she watches that, right?

How do you translate that to the legal industry? Well, what if you took that same concept of people holding their phone, talking to their phone that people are using on e-commerce, and you do that in the legal space. So having testimonials of people who show up like, “Hey, did you know that if you work with so-and-so law firm, your case is going to be handled by a great group of lawyers,” and you talk about some of the value propositions that are unique to that firm, start amplifying that with paid layering on various demographic characteristics. You have the creative that you test, different braces, ages, genders, and I’ll go back to the cheat codes. And I love sharing this stuff because it is so unique and so forward-thinking, start looking at lookalike audiences and then layering interests and demographics on top of your lookalike audiences with this creative that people are used to responding to from other industries. I think that’s how you see success on the social media side.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more in terms of the focus, the investment of having to put out great content. It has to be great. It has to be entertaining. There’s an excellent book, Snow Leopard, where it talks about reaffirming and beliefs and humor and using that as a method of attacking a broadband. But if you go too narrow and you’re just talking about the area of law, you’re, “Hey guys, you’re going to have to pump some ads behind it to be seen because the social media, how they monetize is first yeah, you get a lot of organic reach, but as soon as they get enough content, they’re going to crank down that organic reach and make it pay to play.” Jon, one of the questions I get is why does SEO take so long? We hear people say, “It depends.” We hear minimum six months, 12 months. Let’s break this down for our audience. Why does it actually take a long time to generate results?

Jon Robinson:

That’s a great question. So let’s first start with how long does it actually take? Depending on your market, depending on what you have to do, I generally say that you will start seeing an impact in about three months, and then you’ll really start seeing that growth curve move up into the right at a significant tick after about six months. Depends on the geo, depends on the practice area. No one hold me to this because remember, you’re competing against other people who are trying to do the same thing. So three to six months is generally what we say, and if we break down why it takes so long, I think people will really start to get an understanding of what happens behind the scenes at our organizations to make that happen. So the first thing I’ll say is fixing technical issues. Usually what we do is when we start working with a client, the first three months is a complete rebuild of their site.

Usually the prior agency or internal team or person that was consulting and working on their website doesn’t necessarily have the same level of SEO understanding as we have. And we find that the best thing to do is sort of rip the Band-Aid off and just completely rebuild the entire website from scratch. So we’re implementing the right CSM, we are implementing the right site architecture, we are fixing all the technical issues. Doing that across a multi-hundred page site takes approximately one to three months to do it. So I’ll start with that. When you’re writing content, remember every month you’re producing new content assets. So if we start working with a client the first of the month, maybe their content will be ready to get put on the site about a month later. You then have to wait for that content to get crawled and indexed and actually have an impact, and you’re only producing a certain amount of pages each month that runs in monthly cycles.

Next, as we all know, you have to build a review profile and expand upon your Google Business profile reviews at all of your locations. If you want to rank in the Map Pack, you can’t flip a switch and just all of a sudden get a whole bunch of reviews. So there needs to be a strategy implemented and you need to start collecting those reviews. We generally find that there are about three milestones in how many reviews people need in order to really see an impact. Usually it’s about 10, then 30, and then 100. So you sort of see diminishing returns in between each of those milestones. But depending on where a location sits within each of those different milestones will dictate how long it takes to make that next leap. So think about two to three months until you start seeing those reviews increase.

Now your updates that you made, so you rebuilt the site, you started adding content. Those need to be found by Google, need to be crawled, need to be indexed and taken into account into the search engine. So figure about a month till everything that you’ve done actually gets taken into account. Now let’s talk link building, right? If we say content tells Google what you should rank for. Links, tell Google how high you should rank. It’s an oversimplification by every sense of the discussion. But links help you rank organic link building campaign where you’re reaching out, generating back links. It’s going to take about three months till you really start hitting a sweet spot and generating links through natural outreach.

Chris Dreyer:

Google in 2016 had 6 trillion webpages. So how many webpages are there now that they have to crawl to find this information?

Jon Robinson:

Right. And you are produced a website that is technically great. Now, they can find your site quickly, they can crawl it quickly, but you’re getting links on who knows how many other websites that are not necessarily getting crawled as quickly as yours are. So figure if it takes you three months to build, let’s say 10, 20, 30 links. Now all of those links need to get found in order to be taken into account. This is just a small sampling of what are the reasons why SEO takes as long as it does. I mean, it’s a slog for a reason, and those who do it right and make the right investment in doing it the right way for the right amount of time will see the impact.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. And let’s be clear here on your study, on my study, I’m still seeing at it as the lowest cost per acquisition for PI attorneys.

Jon Robinson:

Absolutely, absolutely. We didn’t even talk about core updates happening. So if those happen once every three to five months, you see these sort of stair steps of growth where every time these core updates hit you jump. That’s when you could really see the lead volume increase and then the case volume increase in your cost per acquisition decrease. Hands down. For the clients that we work with on the SEO side, SEO becomes their lowest cost per acquisition channel. After nine to 12 months. There is not one client where that is not the case.

Chris Dreyer:

Couldn’t agree more. Where can individuals go to get your report, the deck, the intel deck, the cheat codes? Where can they connect with you?

Jon Robinson:

So I actually, I have the updated version of that deck that I presented at the PILMMA conference last month. I’m happy to share that. If anyone wants to reach out to me, I’m on LinkedIn a lot. You can email me jonr@camginc.com. And then if anyone wants to grab that legal marketing index, go to our website, camginc.com, click on Legal Marketing Index. You can see the last six months there available and also sign up and we’ll email it to you every month as soon as the new ones are released.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much for Jon for sharing his insights on digital marketing. Let’s get over those takeaways. Stake your claim. Underserved geographic areas and hyper-specific niches are a golden opportunity. There’s less competition for great leads and a lower cost of acquisition.

Jon Robinson:

Any lawyer in a market that has a presence in a local market and is trying to generate cases within a specific practice area has to look either deeper within that practice area for sort of sub niches. So if we’re talking about medical malpractice, there’s a lot of different types. There’s cancer misdiagnosis, there’s anesthesia error, there’s birth injury. Going deeper into a practice area in your market and understanding what is the competition like for those specific sub practice areas can give you a treasure trove of opportunity.

Chris Dreyer:

It’s all about the Benjamins baby. To see results in SEO, you need to have the right capitalization, make smart investments, and see big results.

Jon Robinson:

Knowing that SEO is not just writing a blog post and walking away. You’ve got link building, you’ve got content creation, you’ve got development, you’ve got design, you’ve got the actual SSEO skills, you spread the few thousand dollars across all those disciplines, and you wind up effectively spending a few hundred dollars here, a few hundred dollars there. The numbers don’t work.

Chris Dreyer:

Be patient. SEO works wonders, but it can’t happen overnight. For increased visibility and higher rankings, you need patience. But trust me, it’s worth the weight. So

Jon Robinson:

We’re implementing the right CSM, we are implementing the right site architecture. We are fixing all the technical issues. Doing that across a multi-hundred page site takes approximately one to three months to do it. Remember, every month you’re producing new content assets. So if we start working with a client the first of the month, maybe their content will be ready to get put on the site about a month later. You then have to wait for that content to get crawled and indexed and actually have an impact and you’re only producing a certain amount of pages each month.

Chris Dreyer:

All right everybody, I hope we added a few more tools to your kit. For more about Jon, head over to the show notes. While you’re there, leave me a five star review. I’ll be forever grateful. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Catch you next time. I’m out.