Mike Perez:
Your website is the foundation of all your marketing success. We want our websites that we create to look better. People that have the more serious cases, they're the ones that are going to do more intense research before they decide on which firm to call.
Chris Dreyer:
In legal marketing, everyone claims they know what works, but very few actually do. That's why today's conversation hits different. Today's guest doesn't just run campaigns, he studies how clients actually hire law firms. His team has researched everything from click patterns to consumer behavior. Today, you get a front row access to what's working right now in the most competitive markets in America.
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind, the show where ambitious attorneys come to learn, implement, and get results. On these special toolkit episodes, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury law firms dominate first-page rankings.
Only a handful of digital agencies in the legal space consistently deliver results for elite PI firms. Today's guest runs one of them. Over the last 20 years, Mike Perez and iLawyer Marketing have shaped how law firms went online. Their websites and campaigns are some of the best in the business. In this episode, Mike shares what's really moving the needle. Let's dive in.
Mike Perez:
We do studies. I try to do at least one or two every year just because I want to try to get inside the mind of the consumer. And a lot of times you hear studies or statistics online, but they're just general statistics. What may work well for e-commerce or other types of businesses, completely different for lawyers.
There was one study recently that said girls in the area of 18 to 21 were using TikTok instead of Google for their primary source of research. But we did a study and when we're talking about hiring lawyers, 90% of them still said that they'd be using Google. So just something to be careful about when we hear statistics online, that that doesn't always apply to our world.
Chris Dreyer:
And you wrote an amazing study. It was a click study about heat maps and basically where consumers ... Google search still owns the lion's share of web traffic. And maybe you could just tell me a little bit about that click study.
Mike Perez:
In terms of that click study, really wanted to find out where people were clicking on in terms of were they clicking on traditional paid ads, LSA ads, local packs, organics. And it was kind of all over the board. Right? Even within those LSA ads and the local pack, those got the most clicks and just shows who the importance of the ads and the copy, the ad copy that you're using in the ad language because some of them had a very high click-through rate.
They were getting a lot of clicks where other ones, even though they were at the top, still weren't getting very many clicks, like low percentage of clicks even though they were up at the top. And so it goes to show that it's not only about where you rank, where you're on the page, but the ad copy. And you really have to think about those kind of things when you're doing marketing that's not as simple as, "Hey, let's run paid ads." Kind of opened my eyes into those kinds of things because I think the automatic assumption is that if you're ranked up high, you're going to get way more clicks just automatically, and that's just not always the case.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I completely agree with that. I've said, I'm sure audience is sick of me saying this, but a lot of times the attorneys say they want to do a channel and the creative and copy are an afterthought. And just goes to show that you can do TV, but if your TV's super generic, you're going to have to spend a ton for people to remember you. You can do Google Ads, but if your copy's stale and it's an afterthought, you're not going to get those CTRs in good prices.
Mike Perez:
When people do paid ads it's, "Hey, paid ads don't work. I've tried it, it doesn't work." Well, it's not that they don't work, it's probably that your campaign was run poorly or inefficiently. But a lot of times we see people that are running existing paid campaign and the landing pages that people are being sent to are awful.
These things are, they're like you said, they're an afterthought. Right? When that should be really your first thought. Your website is the very first impression that you make for a lot of consumers that don't generally know a law firm. They land on your website, so that's a very first impression you make. And if you're not blowing them away, you are losing conversion.
Chris Dreyer:
You've been in the SEO and digital game for a long time, so everybody's a bit different.
Mike Perez:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
How did you get started in this?
Mike Perez:
Yeah, I mean, I've been doing SEO for over 20 years now. I mean, I feel ancient because I've been doing it for so long. My first job out of college was working for a fine law. I was only there for probably about a year and a half, and eventually I just started doing the SEO work myself on a lot of my client sites. I got a lot of them ranking and I said, "Okay, why am I doing this for somebody else?"
Because I was working crazy hours, sometimes 12, 14 hours a day doing my fine law job and then doing the SEO work. And so after a while I left, and that's kind of how I got started. Back in 2005 is when I opened up the agency. I have a lot of great people that are helping me. It's not me by myself. Just like you, you have other people that are doing great work for you, same here. We have other people that do awesome work and some of these guys have been with me for 15 plus years.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I watched this TikTok video yesterday. It was Hormozi and he took a different approach. Everyone wants to talk about SOPs and processes and things like that, and those are great, but what really helps is when you have excellent people that can kind of shoulder a lot of the work and you have those leaders within the organization to push it forward.
Mike Perez:
You're right. I mean, it's important to have those processes, especially as you get bigger and right? It's about having great people, treating those people and making sure they stick with you, doing right by your clients and doing right by your employees. And I think everything works out in the end if you do that.
Chris Dreyer:
Every firm wants to crack the code on local service ads. When LSAs first launched, they seem like the holy grail of lead generation. They promised the world guaranteed leads, prime placement and instant credibility, but the reality is very different from those early gold rush days. Here's what's really happening with LSAs.
Mike Perez:
They're one of those things that got people hooked on LSAs because originally they were so cheap, right? They were an incredible way to leads at an incredible price for those leads. It's a lot harder today. It's a lot harder. There's a lot more variation in those, and there's also something else where you're getting a lot of times where it's showing up for branded searches.
Those are a lot of times it's business that you'd get automatically anyways, but now with branded searches appearing on those LSAs, people are clicking those and so you're paying those same in a high cost. So it kind of muddies the water a little bit then in that aspect. LSAs are great if you can appear there. It's hard to get consistent results with LSAs.
Chris Dreyer:
I mean, you could do perfect intake, no missed calls. They've got the review count, but sometimes it doesn't display for whatever reason. Those are like I would say, the table stakes. No call can be missed. You got to have the reviews and consistent reviews, not just you've had 400 reviews for the last seven months. It's super inconsistent. Let's talk to one that's, let's talk about one that's got more control, Google Ads. Maybe you could just hit on the pros and cons and just your general thoughts on Google Ads.
Mike Perez:
I kind of look at organic SEO as more of an investment. It's going to pay off if you stick with it for enough time, and that's usually going to take a lot longer than any other channel for the most part. But with paid, you can get leads right away. You can't go in there and tiptoe into any competitive market and think that you're going to spend three, four thousand dollars and have results. You're going to have to bring money to play in these larger markets.
And kind of like I mentioned before, a lot of it will depend on the landing page experience, where those people are landing on, what kind of conversion rate does your web page have? Are those being sent to internal pages of they website or are they going to dedicated websites? So for example, we're targeting birth injury in an area, you're going to have more success if it's on a landing page that's specifically dedicated to birth injury. And even to that extent, if you have a specialty domain.
Right? Or if the injury lawyer texas.com or whatever, that is going to generate more click throughs, it's going to generate more trust with the consumers because it looks like you specialize in that particular area. So I think there's a lot of ways that paid can go wrong and there's a lot of things that people can do to make their paid campaigns much more effective. I think it's not for everybody.
Chris Dreyer:
I echo all of those sentiments. I think Pintas & Mullins, we've all seen their Google Ads. They have those niche landing pages. They do that really effectively. The one thing that I just want to call out for the audience is, look, I have Nielsen, you've seen the Nielsen reporting, reports of TV, these spins.
In these spins you've got many individuals will spend 10 million a year on TV and it's just like, "Oh yeah," and it's kind of like, oh, that's just what you spend. And then it comes to Google Ads and it's like balked at 30K a month. From my experience, we've got eight or nine clients, PI clients spending over a 100K a month on Google Ads and they're absolutely crushing it and love it.
Mike Perez:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
Right? Versus the individuals that spend 20 or 30 and are like, "This doesn't work." Have you seen that as well from a capital side?
Mike Perez:
Yeah, I mean, the one thing you got to keep in mind with Google is just because you are, yes, you can pay and get that visibility right away, but that doesn't mean you're going to have success. Right? That campaign needs training, so we're making sure that we're reporting on offline conversion, whether it's a quality lead or a new signed case, we want to send that information back to Google.
So they need training data. And if you have a smaller budget, your training is going to take a much longer time to do, and so the bigger budget you have, you can start impacting and making those changes and impacts on the paid algorithm faster.
Chris Dreyer:
Completely agree. And then SEO. SEO, so a lot of stuff coming out on the AI and look, look, there's already been zero click scenarios on the rich snippets, and so it's not anything new of the top of the funnel getting ate up, but what do you see moving the needle on the map? We'll just kind of blend, we'll do maps and organic and maybe just speak to both of those.
Mike Perez:
Yeah. I mean, maps as we know, are still highly dependent on reviews. Right? That's still crucial. It's very important to have that local Map Pack visibility, but it's also very dependent on the user's location, where there's searching. So I mean, in a perfect world, you have a little bit of everything like visibility with organic, with the Map Pack, with paid, with the paid social, different things.
You have a little bit of everything. But with the Map Pack, there's also a lot of spam, right? And that's frustrating to deal with because how many lawyers or law firms do we see where we know that those reviews are not authentic and that they're made up? When you see some of these firms that have thousands of reviews, and we even have some kind of software we developed internally just to be able to track that.
And sometimes we'll run a law firm's reviews in there, and you can see the spikes in the single month where they got 350 reviews and then every other month it's four or five. So you'd kind of know when something fishy happens. And the truth is Google knows. It's very easy for them to be able to detect this, but at least at this point, it's certainly not something that they care enough about. They say they do, but I don't know how much they really actually care about that.
For those firms that are doing it the right way, I mean, 98% of consumers said that they would research reviews of that law firm before they went out and hired a firm. So recency of reviews matters. That matters to the local pack, but it also matters to consumers. In order to convert, you have to have those reviews. So every law firm should make that a huge priority going forward just because consumers are totally relying on it.
Chris Dreyer:
We both know the impact of links, backlinks on an SEO campaign and a local SEO campaign. So maybe you could just talk about 1Point21 Interactive and some of the unique things that you guys do to acquire links.
Mike Perez:
Links are very difficult to get organically for attorneys. People don't just want to link to a lawyer's website. So the idea is that you want to create content that will at least drive interest and awareness. And if you create exceptional content, a lot of times even the local media will cover it. And sometimes we've had clients get on TV from some of the studies that we've done.
And so I had created 1Point21 really to be a data visualization, a data analysis company, and that kind of works hand in hand with iLawyer is we'll create content that's usually data driven. So we'll try to find a data source, analyze the data, and then do data visualization. Then we have data visualization specialists on our team. We have a whole staff that geared to this. We have people that used to work in newsrooms, so we kind of have a full-fledged team that knows what's going to be interesting to the media and to other websites out there.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's face it, being a great lawyer isn't enough. To succeed, you need to generate consistent leads. Personal injury is the most saturated niche. Competition is fierce, and differentiation is everything. When the deck is stacked against you, you need a comprehensive resource to beat the competition. My latest book, "Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing," is your roadmap to consistent leads and exponential growth. It is a masterclass on marketing for personal injury firms.
It's packed with actional strategies on where to invest your marketing dollars for maximum impact. No more guesswork, no more wasted ad spend, just clear proven methods to transform your firm from good to go. Grab your copy of Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing on Amazon. Link is in the show notes.
Let's jump over to web design and UX. I really, I genuinely mean this, you guys create some of the best websites in the business for lawyers, and so let's just hit that. And you talked about the importance of having a good home base and that first impression. What makes a good website? When should attorneys think about a redesign? Hit me just big picture your thoughts on design.
Mike Perez:
The internet is like dog years, right? So one year on the internet, it's like seven years in terms of everything gets old very, very quick. But of course it goes back to how that site is converting. If something is converting at an incredible rate, you don't want to mess with success. So how do we get more people to visit the site?
How do we get a higher percentage of those people to pick up the phone and call the attorneys or contact the attorneys or start the chat with the firm? And so conversion rate optimization is key, and so having those fundamentals on the website that you create is important. Again, your website is the foundation of all your marketing success, so you got to have something that's going to visually impress the consumer.
If you have this old outdated site, consumers are going to think that maybe you're not up with the times in terms of technology and you don't want consumers thinking that about your firm, especially if it's a consumer who's shopping around looking for different attorneys and comparing different firms and choosing which one to choose.
Chris Dreyer:
And the same could be said about the reviews, the serious cases. If you got a 4.3 out of five, they're not going to them.
Mike Perez:
A hundred percent, totally.
Chris Dreyer:
If you're a PI attorney, and not just digital, just marketing mix, maybe you could just your thoughts on a startup, a midsize, one million to 10, and then maybe a larger. Just your overall thoughts and just kind of the state of the environment right now.
Mike Perez:
Yeah. I mean, it's for somebody who's just starting out, at the very least, you need to invest in a very good website. If you have a website and it's built on a CMS like WordPress, we built all our sites on WordPress, and we can want to make it easy for our clients to be able to easily create their content or to take it with them wherever they go, if they want to go to a different agency, with a CMS so that you can go in and add content yourself if you have time.
Because a lot of firms that are just starting out, they have time to create content at least when they don't have business early on. Right? So if you can create content on that content aspect that will warn people about AI and just use an AI generated output, the AI generated, eventually it could come back to haunt you. And right now, sites are getting completely hammered. And I know it's an easy button and the output seems like it's great, but it's detectable. You can use it for ideas, but just don't copy and paste what you get in terms of the output, or you're asking for a world of hurt in the future.
Chris Dreyer:
For those firms that have the budget, maybe just lump them together. The marketing mix, let's really narrow it like the auto accident of attorneys. Right?
Mike Perez:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
What's that look like?
Mike Perez:
We both know how competitive this industry is, especially for personal injury and especially for auto accidents. The people that are ranking right now, those people have spent a lot of time and money into SEO. For a lot of them, they have thousands and thousands of pages of content. Right? They develop and create a topical authority on a subject matter, and that's why they rank aside with the links that they've learned or they earned over the course of time.
So someone's not going to come in and just beat those guys to the bunch. So a smarter strategy maybe is going in and trying to target not just bottom of the funnel search terms, like car accident lawyer, Miami, but to think about answering questions that consumers have. Right? Should I talk to my insurance company after an accident? Are my insurance rates going to go up after an accident that wasn't my fault? So ideally, you're targeting all parts of the funnel, top, middle, and bottom of the funnel in terms of the content you create.
You need to at least have that organic strategy. But in a perfect world, you're doing a little bit of everything because for most people, it takes multiple days, that research process. For smaller cases, sometimes people, they won't do as much research and they'll call right away. But for anybody that has a serious case, and most of the clients that we work with, and I'm sure same with you, they want serious cases.
Those people are doing research, and for a lot of those people, it takes a period of time. So you got to bring those people back. Even if they've been to your website, they're going to leave, but how do you bring them back? So running ads, running retargeting ads on Instagram, on Facebook, potentially even TikTok, potentially YouTube.
There's a lot of talk about social, and for some firms, especially ones starting out, maybe they do have the time to do that, but it takes a lot of time. I've never seen firms over the years, there's hardly any firms that I've ever seen that have had great success doing organic social, and so paid social is usually the way to go. It's usually a much better spend of your time and money. I'm not saying that organic social can't work, but it's very hard to do it.
Chris Dreyer:
Some individuals just don't understand you need a video production studio, you need to be constantly thinking about being entertaining and the hooks and engagement and all these things. And that's a lot of work. Versus paid social, maybe get some great creative and just pump some ad towards it.
Mike Perez:
And the other thing I'll say too is that it's very important that if you are a firm, that you hire the right marketing company, right? Do your research. And I think attorneys hear the price tag, a low price tag, and they're like, "Okay, I'll do that because it's cheaper." But that's just money wasted, thrown out the window.
And a lot of times as well, not only is it wasted money, but a lot of times that SEO is doing damage to that law firm's website because they're getting really low quality links. And those are the kinds of things that put your website at risk for Google's future algorithmic updates. Be careful about who you choose and make sure that you vet who you're considering hiring.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up our conversation with Mike Perez. What stands out to me is how the game has fundamentally changed, whether it's turning data into media coverage, optimizing landing pages for seven figure cases, or building authentic digital reputations that actually convert. You can learn more about rankings and all the resources Mike mentioned in the show notes.
And while you're there, pick up a copy of my new book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing: From Good to GOAT. If you're serious about scaling your firm in 2025, this episode is worth a second listen. Take notes, share it with your team, leave your boy a five star review, and most importantly, take action. All right, everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
