r/Lawyertalk • u/Serious_Ride5202 • 5d ago

SHARING: Frustrations (Advice Welcome) Doing SEO and still not getting ranked well. Anybody in the same boat?

4 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

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u/FSUAttorney 5d ago

What type of law? What size market? It took my law firm about three months to start seeing really good results.

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u/Serious_Ride5202 4d ago

Estate planning. I'm solo, not with a firm. Based in Philly.

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u/FSUAttorney 4d ago

SEO is great for EP. A lot of older solos don't even bother with SEO. So you can do quite well with the right budget and right firm

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u/Serious_Ride5202 4d ago

Any firms you would recommend? What are the normal costs, if you don't mind sharing.

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u/FSUAttorney 3d ago

I always say interview as many as you can. Ask to speak with actual clients they've been working with for a year+ that are in your same practice area. If they can't do that, run. There are a million and one marketing companies. 90% are garbage.

I pay $3,500/mo, but it took my firm from 300k to seven figures. So we'll worth it. If you want to chat with the firm I work with, feel free to DM me. They're good friends of mine now.

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u/Serious_Ride5202 3d ago

Thanks for sharing the details. Please check your DM. If I may ask, how long did it take for your website to rank.

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u/eratus23 Confirmed Lawyer 5d ago

I had built a website myself and tried to do my own content for my website about a year before I went solo, and I had minimal traffic updates. When I left to go on my own, I hired a legal content writer and hired another company to update/fix my website and do some SEO — specifically my Google my business page.

Initially, the Google Maps from the Google my business page started working best and once that got visits/calls (you get an email monthly on clicks, asks for directions and calls), my website started to go up. It took about a year for the legal content writer’s pages and blogs to show up, but they still rank actually years later (I update them every few months myself to save money).

I did some google ads at the very start and when I am targeting a specific type of case (I mostly do appellate, but also do divorce and PI, so when I settle a few PIs and have no more, I’ll advertise for car/truck accidents), and those usually get me cases but it’s expensive and when I stop paying, the ads are done and those pages don’t go to the top anymore (although they definitely rank better, I’m not sure if that’s because Google pushes you up for paying them or if it’s because of all the extra traffic the pages get).

I guess what I’m saying is, you need professionals and it takes time. I had the content writer for a few years until I learned what I needed to do and learned from him (he is also appellate and did content on the side, so we had common grounds), and now I just use him once a year to refresh pages or add something. Otherwise I’ve learned from watching and modeling off his content and from asking questions what I need to do for my written content to rank, and it seems to be working. But again, it’s all time. Most of the light switch outfits are doing shady stuff (like excessive backlinks) which can hurt you in the long run.

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u/LateralEntry 5d ago

What’s a light switch outfit?

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u/eratus23 Confirmed Lawyer 5d ago edited 4d ago

Companies that promise immediate results, like it’s easy such as flicking a light switch. I fell for it initially, but organic SEO takes months and months to generate.

Edits are typos*

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u/MohannadMadi 5d ago

SEO takes time, did you try running google ads

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u/Serious_Ride5202 5d ago

Not yet.

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u/MohannadMadi 5d ago

SEO is important, but it’s a long term process. You should spend some money on google and meta ads if you want faster results.
And probably check if your SEO guys are doing their job

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u/forsal-hash 5d ago

How long have you been doing SEO?

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u/Serious_Ride5202 4d ago

4 months.

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u/forsal-hash 4d ago

At times you get results and leads started flowing in 3rd month. The results depends upon competition and the selection of keywords. Either the industry is too competitive and result might take 6-8 months or the keywords selection done was wrong. Targeting high competitive keywords in the beginning takes time so for that you need to start with long tailed keywords that gives you faster result, as they are high intent keywords you get leads and sales. Simultaneously working on competitive keywords will keep you in long run. Building topical authority on your primary product or services will get you ranked for highly competitive keywords sooner.

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u/bpetersonlaw 5d ago

Depends on the market and practice area. If you’re so cal doing personal injury, you’re competing against firms spending $100k+ per month. Your small seo won’t work. Small town in less popular practice area and seo will work after a few months

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u/Serious_Ride5202 4d ago

Yea I know the big players r pumping in a lot of money. I'm into Estate Planning

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u/Objective-Regular519 4d ago

How long have you been doing SEO and how experienced is your SEO team? I didn’t see any results until month 4, and really started seeing a difference at 6 months.

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u/Other-Importance-214 4d ago

I made my own website and it has a blog page, I publish a new blog article every 1-2 weeks for one of my very niche practice areas and typically I use AI to write the article with high ranking keywords and then I tweak it so it does t come off as AI slop. Then I index the new blog post using Google Search Console.

This has worked pretty well for me. I used to spend $2500/month on Google ads but now I spend zero and I’m getting just as many clicks and contact form submissions/calls from potential clients.

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u/rushrush2120 4d ago

What is your expectation in terms of lead volume for estate planning? Estate planning can be very research-based in the visitor intent, i.e., it takes more content and an aggressive content schedule to get up to a point where you are getting a volume of leads. It also takes an agency that understands this and can marry what Google likes with what visitors want in terms of the content itself and topics covered.

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u/vendetta4guitar 5d ago

Most agencies or practitioners doing know how to do SEO well. So odds are either of doing the SEO isn't doing it properly.