Chris Dreyer:
As the owner of a digital marketing agency, I see firms getting sold on solutions that might not be right for them.
John Schroeder:
95% of agencies are not top level, 5% are, so if you figure there's 200 out there, maybe there's 10 that are really doing high quality work and can rank PI firms consistently.
Chris Dreyer:
After all, when every expert is trying to sell you something, how do you really know what your firm needs?
John Schroeder:
The problem is the firm is 50K in the hole by the time they figure that out in 90 days.
Chris Dreyer:
So today I wanted to hear from someone who has no horse in this race, someone who can offer an unvarnished raw look into your blind spots, so you can decide what's actually best for your firm. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the SEO agency of choice for law firms. You're listening to Personal Injury Mastermind where we provide the tools and instructions you need to build a solid personal injury practice.
John Schroeder:
We do an unbiased analysis and we do a deep dive into things that we think move the needle, certain SEO things.
Chris Dreyer:
John Schroeder, owner of De Facto Digital Consulting, has built a business doing something radical, telling law firms the brutal truth about their marketing performance. I sat down with John to understand how he approaches these audits, what he's learned from analyzing firms across the country, and most importantly, what actually works in legal marketing when you strip away all the sales pitches. Here's our conversation.
John Schroeder:
It takes us about 21 days. We provide a report and then we have an implementation call and we go from there.
Chris Dreyer:
So let's dig into that. It is De Facto Digital Consulting, so is it mostly around the digital, the numbers, the attribution. Are you looking at their media buying, their radio stuff like that too, or is it focused more on the digital?
John Schroeder:
It's entirely digital. We might take into consideration what they're spending on TV, and I know you said TV's not really the thing right now, but they still spend on that. They spend on billboards. We might take a brief look at that, but that's not really where we're focused. It's almost entirely on SEO, Google paid ads, including LSAs and intake, and also there's some branding involved as well, so some branding analysis.
Chris Dreyer:
You've done a lot of these audits for big firms and small firms and all different sizes in the PI space. Just current state of PI, when you open up their lead docket or their litifier, what have you, what's showing as case conversions? What's generating the cases? What's the big channels that you see?
John Schroeder:
SEO almost always. Partially paid ads. The problem with paid ads now is it's become so Google controlled that it's really difficult to get any traction there, and if you don't have a true expert running the paid ads campaign, I think it's the quickest way to blow through money, but we're still seeing really great results from SEO if it's done properly.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I see that as well, and I know there's some murkiness, right, Because the TV builds a brand, and the radio builds a brand, and then they Google the search and it's attributed to that SEO, so I'm cognizant of that even though I'm a little biased as the SEO guy too. When you're looking at intake, are you listening to calls? Are you checking missed calls? What goes into that side of the evaluation?
John Schroeder:
Yeah, a lot of it is just basically fill out the form on the firm website, you get a response, and if you get a response, it's a response that is within proper standards. We also secret shop and make phone calls at different times of the day. Who's answering the phone? Do they sound like they're well trained? Do they sound like they have some training in sales to where they could actually sign the client? So it's pretty low tech, but I think it works from the standard of the average person picking up the phone and calling a firm or filling out the form, so I think it's been effective, and this may or may not surprise you, 90% of it seems to be, the intake seems to be substandard, so there's a lot of leads that are going unsigned, probably legitimate cases too.
Chris Dreyer:
I just had a conversation with Harlan Schillinger earlier today and we were talking about intake, and every time I hear... I spoke with Lauren Von from Quintessa and there's some bias, see, right. Harlan built Lead Docket, but he's also a marketer and Lauren has an intake background, but I continually hear it over and over again, that a lot of people can generate cases, but the real players have dialed in their intake. Is that what you're seeing?
John Schroeder:
Absolutely. Absolutely. We've seen firms that are spending. Well, we've worked with firms anywhere from 5K a month to big regional firms that are spending a hundred K a month on digital marketing, and like I said, maybe you're not surprised, there's so much waste, there's so much being lost through that substandard intake process, but the good news is I see a lot of companies starting to take advantage of that and start training up law firms and their staff on how to do proper intake, so I think it's trending in the right direction.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I agree. I think just the cost to acquire a case increasing is forcing that too, right? It's like now it's not just these gigantic margins and low CPAs. You have to just be really careful to collect everything you can. I'm sure some of those listening or thinking on the digital side, like, "Well, I think we're doing pretty good, but I don't really know." I guess let's start with each of the big ones. What are the common mistakes you see? And let's start with the SEO side. Well, what are some of the big common mistakes you see?
John Schroeder:
A lot of it comes down to... I think, you'd probably agree with this, maybe not, but I think most of SEO is high-level content and backlinks. Of course, everything else is important from on-page and technical, but I think it really needs to be worked every month, and I think this is why you're different as well. You're actually doing the work. You're writing high level content. You're writing, or you're providing, high-level backlinks to the client. You're pointing them to the internal pages.
But I think the biggest issue that we see is the backlink profile, and I think it's still very legitimate when it comes to rankings. We're not seeing a lot of links that are pointed to the practice area pages, the car accident pages, the truck accident pages. Maybe that's difficult for certain link builders to do, but it's really not, and I think it makes a big difference. We did our little basic study or research on this, and we looked at a bunch of firms that rank very well in big cities, and every one of them, almost every one of them, had multiple links pointed to their car accident page, to their money pages, as they say, so I think that's a huge factor and one of the biggest things we see.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I won't beat a dead horse here, but if you do an audit on any or some rush for any market, it's typically the people that have the most referring domains that are high quality, because sometimes they got junk links that tend to rank, just extra signals. What about on the paid side? Do you get read access? How are you evaluating paid? Do they give you access like that?
John Schroeder:
Yeah, so we do get read-only access, which is the only way that we could really do it. We have a person who does this with us, and I think he's the best in the industry at running paid ads campaigns, but also showing why they're not working, and like he says, it's got to be as manual as possible. I think Google's trying to take that manual control away from the management side, but I think you have to fight it or... You're going to get clicks, but not necessarily cases. Google's always been about Google and why wouldn't they be? They're there to make money, right?
Chris Dreyer:
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And we've seen what happens when you turn on that Pmax campaign. It's basically like their remnant inventory. They're just spraying that sucker everywhere. Common mistakes, it's more manual, controlling it more. Do you look at the landing page? Is any major mistakes on that side, on the CRO side?
John Schroeder:
I think it's 50/50 now whether you should have landing pages or you should just direct it to the regular website. Always been preferred landing pages. I just think statistics show that it is probably a better idea to have a separate landing page to capture that information quickly, so landing pages aren't necessarily a big issue that we see. A lot of it is the ads and having Google write the ad headlines when you could easily be writing more effective headlines. So like I said, it's about wrestling control as much as you can away from Google.
Chris Dreyer:
For the intake team, what's some of the big mistakes? Is it just as simple as just missing calls and taking too long to answer?
John Schroeder:
Yeah, absolutely. It should be answered on the first ring. It shouldn't go five, six, seven rings. Ultimately, take it seriously. Have your intake people be salespeople. Have them be trained to sign clients. I've heard there's some firms out there that have potential clients sign the documents on the first call and then work out the issues. That to me would be the best way to go about doing it because... They're probably, a potential client, is calling three, four, five firms. It's a race basically, and if you're not calling them back immediately, what you're missing out on could be massive. It's just a situation where they're not taking it seriously and for whatever reason they think they could just have anybody answer the phone, and it's never been the case.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, yeah, that's what I see as well. It's like speed wins on the intake, follow-up, things like that. What have you seen in terms of effectiveness for in-house versus third party? Do you see third party being extremely effective sometimes, or is it just the control and the in-house the better setup typically?
John Schroeder:
I guess it all depends on the quality of the people you hire, but I really like the idea of having a third party do it. Because it could be 24 hours, they're trained, they have scripts, they're trained on every possible scenario, and I think it's hard to go against a system that's only set up to sign potential clients, whereas somebody in-house... Maybe if you're a big enough firm with a big enough budget, you can have an in-house team dedicated to intake. I've seen it. I've seen it with a couple of big firms in New York, and it seems to work out really well. It just all depends on where you've want to focus your resources.
Chris Dreyer:
You built this reputation of providing honest and unbiased evaluations of law firms' marketing strategies. Can you share with our audience what inspired you to start your company?
John Schroeder:
We started at Fighting Law, selling leads to lawyers. I was very fortunate to learn from a great salesman. I started working for SEO companies, paid ad companies, picked up a lot of good skills along the way, but eventually you come to realize that agencies tend to be biased towards what they do best, right? It's the old adage, if you're only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, so it's like, "Hey, we sell PPC management. That's what we do best. Therefore Mr. Lawyer, you must invest in paid ads," right, so maybe, maybe not.
It used to drive me crazy and I hated it. I thought it was a little bit disingenuous, so we figured there was a market out there, or an opportunity to just do the analysis and to sell the analysis, and then the consulting without selling services on the back end, and it's been received pretty well.
Chris Dreyer:
The agencies that are the churn and burn agencies probably hate your guts, but the good agencies love you, right, because you're recommending them to good partners, right? So if an individual wants to get your audit, your diagnosis, how long does this take? What's the process involved to do this? Just tell me about... Just fill in the details of some of the things I missed there.
John Schroeder:
It starts with a phone call and we just see if it's a good fit. We could go to work on it. It takes us about 15, 20 days, usually depending on how intensive their Google Ads campaign runs. Sounds really simple. We provide a report. We also provide a video with screenshots, so they can see exactly what it is I'm talking about and seeing, and then we have the implementation call. The goal here is just to get it right, whether the agency fixes it, which is probably best for everybody, that's fantastic, so if we can light a fire under the agency and they fix it, that's happened many times. Everybody's happy, it's all great. Sometimes when it gets down to the end of the analysis, they're ready to make a change, and that's where we... We can facilitate on that as well.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, and tell me... That's amazing on the diagnosis and the unbiased, like, "Hey, are they doing good or not, and here's where the holes are," right, and you've done a lot of these so you can really identify those holes. Tell me about this aspect. What is the consulting service that you offer?
John Schroeder:
We figured that... And we've got good relationships with a few agencies, but even the best ones tend to miss the mark on a client from time to time. It happens. We've analyzed a lot of different agency work, so we know who can deliver consistently, and you know what? I've heard you say it. There's definitely a hierarchy of competence and there's a lot of reasons for that, specific business reasons with that agency, but if we can keep agency clients happy and uncover issues before they become unfixable and that the firm has one foot out the door, that's great.
Chris Dreyer:
John Schroeder offers a unique lens into what's actually working in the legal marketing space. By removing the bias of trying to sell services, he's able to give firms the brutal truth about their operations, and then take gaps to marketing blind spots. The key takeaway, whether you're spending $5,000 or a hundred thousand dollars a month on marketing, you need objective data to make informed decisions about your firm's future. Sometimes that means bringing in someone with no stake in the game to tell you what's really going on.
If you found value in the episode, make sure to subscribe to Personal Injury Mastermind wherever you get your podcasts, and for more insights on growing your firm, grab a copy of my new book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing: From Good to GOAT. You can find all the links in the show notes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on the next episode of Personal Injury Mastermind.
