Chris Dreyer:
You're told your website is holding you back and you need a total rebuild. But before you write a massive check, ask yourself, is this the rebuild for your firm's growth or just to fit your marketing agency's backend production line? I've seen beautiful websites struggle to capture leads and ugly websites convert, because they have the right messaging backed by a killer intake process. Today, we're cutting through the noise to answer a very important question. Should you fix your law firm's website or replace it? This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Let's get into it.
Should you fix a website or replace it? What comes top of the dome is, first, how much capital do you have? Are you a designer? Probably not. You're probably an attorney that wanted to start a career and you want to try cases, but you need a marketing asset to drive people to. So, should you fix it? Well, again, if you don't have the capital, immediately I would try to fix it. Maybe it's Core Web Vitals, maybe it could be a plugin, maybe it could be title tags, metadata, et cetera. Hopefully, you're on a WordPress content management system. So, WordPress is a little bit more intuitive, a little bit more user-friendly. If you're capital constraint, I would try to fix it. However, the other thought that comes to mind is, how much marketing are you deploying? Sometimes you don't even need a website. You could have an Instagram page that you drive everyone to or a Facebook page.
All of these are free. You don't actually need a website. You could go buy a domain and say, "Go to chriswins.com," that redirects to your LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, what have you. So, that's the really cheap and dirty. But I would say, if you're deploying a lot of capital, especially you're considering one of the big top of funnel channels, so that would be broadcast television, radio, streaming, TV, YouTube, you're going to need a great website to convert that traffic. It's so valuable that you want to think about all of the elements to convert cold and warm traffic. That means great copywriting, good call to actions, forms in the right location. It loads quickly. It answers the consumer's problems. It helps advise them, because sometimes people aren't in the, "Hey, let me hire an attorney." They're on the fence. They want to learn and educate themselves before they make a buying decision.
If that's the case, then yes, get it designed professionally. Again, it comes down to your capital. If you got that $100,000 budget, then you're going to be investing in primarily a WordPress site, not a ton of pages. You could probably get one for less than 20, certainly. If you are deploying a ton of capital and every conversion opportunity really matters, then maybe you want to go through the whole brand identity, survey my past clients, do some investigation, and research on your ICP. How old are they? What's the demographics look like? And cater your copywriting to that individual to even give it that slight little edge. I would say that's more for the eight-figure, nine-figure firms that are spending a lot of money. Most of the time, you need a strong website that has good content, good forums, and that's where you need to go. Capital constraints? Maybe try to fix it or drive them to something free.
If you got a little bit of capital, I would try to do a WordPress site. There's also the thought, a lot of times when you have a constrained capital budget, we're all constrained because of the cashflow acceleration cycle for personal injury law firms. Do you want to go spend $20,000 to tune up a website, and wait, go through that process? Or would you rather just spend $20,000 for more marketing distribution? Most of the time I would take the marketing distribution or the search engine optimization, or the social media marketing to get your name out there. A lot of times the bigger CRO companies, and I use a buddy of mine, his name's Justin Croxton. He wrote the book Conversion Fanatics. That was his former agency.
Most of the time, people that talk about CRO, you don't have enough traffic to even do CRO to make it a significant difference, or to get enough data to inform the decision that you should change this color or that color, or this website, or that website. So, I would say, first, really pile into the distribution, as opposed to the conversion mechanic. That's where I would start. If a firm owner came to me and if they were talking about their website not converting, the first thing that I would ask about, actually in advance of even discussing this, because... And I'm not trying to be a pessimist here, because there's a lot of... sometimes there's an insecurity, there's this hesitation to trust the agency.
Dr. House, remember the House show, everybody lies. They're not trying to be deceitful, but they don't want to tell the complete truth if they're failing. So, let's get that out of the way. So, the first thing I would do before I even asked is I would go to their LinkedIn company profile and I would look at their intake team. How big are they and how many intake specialists do they have? Do they have one? Bad sign. They have a couple? Bad sign. That's the first thing I would look at. So, a lot of times we hear, "Oh, the website isn't converting," but it's bullshit. What really is happening is their intake specialists, they don't have an actual dedicated sales process.
What's their wanted conversion percentage rate? That's the first thing I would ask. "Hey, what's your wanted conversion percentage? Of the cases that you want, what percentage are you closing?" If they give you that, "Well, I think, or we close everyone we want," they don't know and it's probably 60, 70%. That's the reality. If you're an attorney that says that, you're wrong. You are not converting at 90 something percent. I promise you. Even if it goes to your cell phone, even if it goes round-robin to these other people, you'll be astonished once you get the data because there's a multitude of factors. You could be on the phone and someone calls, you miss that opportunity.
You could be working a case and you don't return it within five minutes. They go contact someone else. It could be weekends, nights. People don't want to wait on the line over 20, 30 seconds. So, if you go to this phone tree and you start transferring all the place, they leave, too. That's the first thing I want to ask is, why isn't your website converting? So, what's your wanted conversion rate? Also, what are you doing for marketing? How are you advertising right now? You got four billboards and that's it? Sorry, Bubba. You only do B2B referrals? Probably not a website issue. You're not ranking? Or here's a big one. From a search engine optimization perspective, maybe you're ranking at the bottom of page one.
You ever been in the scenario where, yeah, we're getting some leads, but they all suck? And the reason is if you're getting contact, it's probably the number one result, number two, number three. They already turned down the case, because it wasn't a good case and you're getting the contact. You got to be in that top position. That's where LSA comes into play. That's Google Maps, all the things. So, I would really diagnose and ask a lot of questions around sales, around their marketing, around what they're doing to advertise. And then there's under the hood stuff. And then I would get into the SEO land. I would look at Core Web Vitals, page speed insights. I would look at whether it's Ahrefs or Semrush. I would do some diagnostic work. I would check the speed, the load speed. I would check the title tags. I would check all the UX and conversion components. But at the very beginning, I would ask about their sales team and how they're marketing to generate leads.
There's a number of situations where you would want to get a new website. Let's say you come from a different marketing agency that has their own proprietary CMS that really controls the code. They'll say, "Yeah, we'll give you your website. Here's all the Figma files and all the design aesthetics, but we're going to keep the code in the backend." And it doesn't work. And so, there'd be scenarios where you want to own and control. This is one of your most valuable assets. It's typically the bottom of the funnel where you're driving all the attention to. So, that's number one. You want to have a great hosting provider because you want as much uptime as possible. We really like WP Engine. It's US-based support, at least last I checked. And there are scenarios where you need to update your website to WordPress. I'm going to kind of contradict myself, though.
I have seen some of the ugliest websites on the planet convert. They do not have to be a looker. I think a lot of times I want these showstopper aesthetic websites. It's more about the messaging and the positioning and less about the aesthetics. The aesthetics can psychologically help from a social proof, a trust, cohesion, consistency with your brand. And then it's consistent when you go to the website. All those can play into the psychological triggers around trust. But I've seen some really ugly websites and I'm talking the biggest firms in the nation. I'm not going to be cold-blooded here and call out a couple of the biggest firms in the nation and their websites. They're converting, though. They're making money.
There's a lot of things. You need to be careful when you are going to update your website and the backend code. You want to try to retain all the search engine optimization benefits that are generating leads and cases for you. So, you need to look at your structure, the architecture of your website, the schema that you can't see the coding, the silos, and how everything's organized by clusters and topics. You want to look at the permanent 301 redirects, if you're going to change locations on the content. So, the content migration, that's probably one of the most critical components, especially on a big site. If you have thousands of pages and you want to change the location of how the content is organized, anytime you move from an old URL, you want to do what's called a permanent 301 redirect. It'll preserve the link equity and it will redirect the consumer to the final destination page.
All this can be seen in Google Search Console. That's a very good tool. Another good tool that you can use for this is Screaming Frog. It will actually crawl your entire website. Those tools have been around for a long time. The other thing that I would think about... And that's like the technical side, that's like the search and the conversion, the UX and all that stuff. Just from a branding and trying to be different and again, you're going to have to take a look at your local market for the most part. Is every website blue? Maybe you choose a different color to stand out. There's scenarios where maybe the lead attorney is a middle-aged white guy. Maybe you've got other staff members to show diversity. Maybe everyone's saying one type of trial attorney messaging;. Maybe you have a little bit more fun with it.
So, you need to look at all your competitors. For the most part though, I'm going to go... And I spoke to Chad Chelly about this. And this is really Chad Chelly's thoughts, so I'm going to give him credit on this. The consumer doesn't give a shit about your client service and oh, we treat clients like family on the front end. They do not care. Let me repeat this. They do not care. Let me articulate this very easily. You got a $60,000 check and great client service, and you got a $90,000 check and terrible client service. They're taking the 90 fucking thousand every time, unless they want justice. There was a wrongful death, some scenario of that nature. It's a money motivation. That is why they're contacting you. It is not client service.
Now here's the deal, you need to have great client service because you want those reviews and those referrals in the future. But think about this, the big engine of the insurance company, State Farm and their 11, $12 billion of combined marketing spend is 10 times the amount of the PI total spend. They have convinced the consumers and the public that lawyers are evil, and you don't like lawyers, and you're all ambulance chasers. So, no consumer wants to even talk to a lawyer, so why would you advertise client service and friendly friend? That's not the right approach. You want to advertise why they're contacting you. They're contacting you because they didn't get a payout and they need money. That is it. I'm talking about the things that most people don't talk about.
The blue collar worker, the lower income household, you all know this. I'm just saying the things that people don't talk about. It's because of money. They don't have the money. Why when there's a recession people are more litigious and they file more lawsuits? They need money. So, advertise that on the front end, your case results. Your case results always have to compare to another result. There has to be comparison. And that's how you should be speaking to the public 99% of the time. The rest of it, yes, have the Ritz-Carlton experience for those reviews, but you should be thinking about your copy in the prospect and what their pain is. Speak to them and that's going to help you from a conversion perspective.
There are some scenarios where a prospect comes to us. So, you're a lawyer and you've got maybe multiple practice areas. Maybe you have a personal injury practice and you have a criminal defense practice. And there's this common question of, should I merge the sides? Should I keep them separate? From my purview, and I've looked at thousands of, I'm going to stick to my lane, personal injury law firm websites, it is very, very, very rare that I see both personal injury and criminal defense ranking. There's a lot of reasons for this. So, first, I'm going to say this, if you have two different practice areas, first, on the Google Business Profile, you only get one primary category. Is it going to be personal injury attorney or is it going to be a criminal justice? So, the primary category, not the secondary. The other thing, too, is you rank based upon relevance, distance and prominence. And relevance being the key word here.
If you don't want mixed in talking about your DUI and shoplifting, and all this stuff, and expungements with an auto case, so that confuses Google in terms of the relevance and how they should sort you in the search engine. I have other scenarios. I had a peer reach out to me and he's like, "Hey, Chris, can you check out this website? I cannot figure out why it's not ranking for these personal injury terms." I look at the reviews. None of them are about personal injury. They were all about estate planning. And so, Google thinks it's an estate planning website, even though it had way more reviews than everybody else. So, I would say, first, if you have separate practice areas, I would keep the website separate. That's a little bit different. You could make some arguments. I would love to hear some arguments of people that don't agree with that and some exceptions there.
But I would even go further and I would have a separate LLC. I'd have a HoldCo and these would be OpCos and they would be completely separate. I would probably use a DBA, where you're using maybe injury or accident, maybe in your name for the DBA for the GBP on the PI side, but I would... So, that's a scenario, practice areas. If you're in one of these scenarios where you have multiple PI sites, like for whatever reason you did one for Nebraska, then you did one for Arizona, then you did one for Texas, I would merge those. You can silo your content. You're still speaking to the injured victim. That's where I would do a merge. Then there are some scenarios where I would keep it separate. Here's another scenario where I would keep it separate. Let's say you're a personal injury attorney, but you happen to do maritime law.
The positioning of the entire website's about maritime. It makes you look like an expert. And these are bigger cases, typically. Typically, there's something serious that happens on one of these, whether it's a sexual assault or a very serious injury. So, I would probably keep those separate. And again, all your content is about maritime. It's not about car wrecks. And I'll give you one final scenario and I'm going to contradict myself here. Originally, this is an exception. Originally I said, "Hey, separate your practice areas." Let's say you're in a very small market. You don't have any intentions of expanding outside of where I'm at. Marion, Illinois. I don't even know how many people are here. 20,000, 30,000. It's going to be really challenging for you to niche into one practice area. You're going to need to list all of your practice areas, but your advertising is different here.
You're not advertising that you're a personal injury attorney. You're advertising that you're an attorney because there's not very many attorneys in this city. And because you're Tam, your total addressable market's so small, you want to have wider coverage. So, those are some scenarios back and forth. I think it comes down to it depends. Look, my first example of separating PI and criminal defense, it depends. If you are ranking both and you are the exception, then keep them both on one. Don't separate. But those are the scenarios that come to mind on should you merge, not merge. There are benefits of merging from an SEO perspective. All the links can be 301 redirected and you can increase your domain authority, your domain rating. Maybe more content and more visitors driving to one location creates more activity, and signals on Google so it gets crawled more frequently and it's indexed better.
In general, though, it's a it depends. So, there are some scenarios where you got a great website, you got content, but it's not ranking. What are some of the scenarios that come to mind? First, you need to endorse your content. That means backlinks, that means external references. That's what gets Google's attention to crawl. Originally, when Google was founded and how they were differentiated from AOL and these other sites is they used links as a mechanism to sort the web. It was a voting mechanism. The more links and the quality of the links, the better it would move up in the search results. That still holds true today. They put a lot of guardrails on it. It's more challenging to... You have to have higher authority links, better links, more relevant links. You can't just go spam and get a bunch of links and expect to move up in the search results like you could 10 years ago.
But let's say the scenario, you've got a good website, you do have quality links, as far as you know. Maybe you've done some digital PR, maybe traditional PR, maybe you've been in the news and you've done some big cases. And let's just say that the offsite signals are good and you take a look at your content. One of the common things I see, and surprisingly, I still see this today when I get a prospect, is that we're not ranking for New York. And I go and look at the title tag. When you do a query in Google and you go look at the results, the topic, top part is the title tag. A lot of times I'll look at those pages and they're wanting to target New York and it doesn't even mention a city. It doesn't mention a state. And it's like, okay, well, now you're competing with everyone in the nation, instead of your local market.
Again, I'm in Marion. So, if I want to rank in Marion, Illinois, I would say Marion car accident lawyer. I wouldn't just say car accident lawyer. There are some big firms that you want to have these non-geo modified pages that don't list a geo, because they are advertising nationwide and they have these big distribution campaigns, but I promise you they also have the geo-modified pages. I looked at a website today, a website, a very prominent website out of Florida. They've got the non-geo modified personal injury, et cetera. And then they have a locations page. And on the locations page they've got their Florida, Miami, Colorado, et cetera. Those all have the built out silos. You also want to look at the competitors that are ranking number one. What do they have on their pages? Do they talk about local interstates, the hospitals nearby? Do they have driving directions to the office?
Do they have pictures of the attorneys that you'll work with? Do they have case results specific to the page? Do they have testimonials specific to the page? Do they have video that explains the process? How thorough are they? How specific to the niche are they? And you just want to make them better. And I'll say one final thing. Let's say you have content that you haven't touched. A lot of times you'll get in this scenario where you write a car accident lawyer practice page and it hasn't been updated for eight years. You're like, "It's on the website. I did it. Let me go write this long tail that gets two impressions a month, instead of working on my main practice page." Go there. Maybe there's an update, case result. Update your content, refresh your content, target keywords properly. Those are some scenarios why your content wouldn't be ranking.
There's this gap between what I would call common generic content and experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. What I mean there is, sure, you can go write an article, let's use St. Louis, and talk about St. Louis car accident lawyer. And you read the content and you're like, "Man, I could just replace the word St. Louis with Chicago. I could replace it with any city, Los Angeles, and it would still work." It's not specific enough. You need to have trustworthy signals. So, that's where you can talk about the local entities that are nearby, maybe the arch. You can talk about your St. Louis based attorneys that practice there. You can talk about they were licensed and have passed the bar in Missouri. You can talk about the number of St. Louis cases they've taken. You try to get a St. Louis resident, a St. Louis consumer to write a testimonial. Same for a case result. You want to be very specific.
You also want to talk about the years of experience that the attorneys practiced this law, how many cases they've done, all these scenarios. But mostly, it's related to the trust components. What can you do to convey trust? What are the social proof signals that you can add that are specific to a market? So, I would say local awards. Maybe you have a St. Louis award. Maybe you have then the social proof of the testimonial. Again, the St. Louis resident, the St. Louis car wreck. All of that plays into the EEAT. And that could be the missing component between your page ranking and not ranking. If you just have a St. Louis car accident or a page and you don't talk about the statute, there's nothing that differentiates it or makes it relevant to the market. You're going to have a lot of challenges in ranking that page.
If I was an attorney, I wish I knew this. Your agency, if they're doing things improperly, can be very detrimental to your success. And I'll tell you a few things. Even the most prominent people that you see on social media, they talk about how good their search is. You go look at their content. I had a prospect from Georgia working with a competing agency and they had a ton of content. But again, it was generic and 10% of it was indexing. 10%. So, that means nine out of 10 of the articles that they're sending you and they're producing all this content, you might as well just take that, light a match, throw it on a stove, burn it up. It's just not contributing. It's generic fluff. It looks like programmatic AI spam, slop. So, if they've created thousands of pages, you may be better off deleting a significant portion of those that are...
First of all, they're not ranking, they're not indexing. Because here's the deal, the link equity that comes to your website, it is diluted across thousands of pages. That link equity travels through your navigation links, your internal links. So, we used to talk about link sculpting and they try to Google... It's a thing. The link equity travels. That's why you put your most prominent pages in the menu and in the footer. So, let's just put a value. Let's just say your external link equity was worth 100 points and you have 100 pages. Well, if you just divided 100, that's one point per page. Now, it doesn't work like that because they all come in at different entry points, but I'm just in general. Now let's take that same scenario and let's say you had 10 pages. You got 100 points of equity coming at 10 pages, 10 points per page, or one page maybe 100.
You want to clean up the crap. Also, Google is in the game to make money, baby. They don't want to crawl 10,000 slot pages. It costs them money and energy to do that. If you have less pages that are good, they're going to crawl them more frequently. So, you may make these major updates to your pages, but you got 4,000 pages. Google's not going to crawl all of them. They're only going to crawl the most important ones. So, look at your Google Analytics. Where are visitors coming in? Those are the pages you need to be actively updating, your practice area pages. That's a content thing. So, I just went on a super ran on the content side. Then there's the link side. There's all kinds of link updates, because Google doesn't want to spam and manipulate the search results with fake links and spam links.
So, if you have a ton of links and you're not ranking, well, what's the quality of those links? Are they low DR? They aren't relevant to your practice? Do you have a bunch of mommy blogger backlinks on a lawyer website? Are you in the bad neighborhood links, maybe some gambling links? There's a variety of factors where there... And you can do this. You can do this on Semrush and go look at this Ahrefs. So, links, that could be a bad issue where they're building all these spam links. And even though you have great content, you're just getting buried because Google doesn't trust your website. There's also scenarios with the Google Business Profile trust rating. Have you ever found a scenario where you open a new office and it's immediately suspended or you change a phone number, it's immediately suspended or your reviews are just leaving?
There is a Google Business Profile trust rating. The more that you have to go to the forum, and try to get that sucker back out of the grave, and unsuspended, and the more fake reviews you have, that's why your reviews don't stick. That's why when you open a new office, that it immediately gets suspended. Google doesn't trust you. It wants to verify and make sure you're a real entity. So, there's scenarios there. So, that would be content, links, the Google Business Profile. There's other scenarios where I've seen one agency in particular, I'm not going to name names, they will buy traffic and send fake traffic to your website to manipulate the indexing of Google. And there's all kinds of studies on CTR manipulation. It can work. CTRs do help the results, but if done properly, and again, you're playing the fire here, long-term, it can really hurt your results.
It also dilutes and messes with your reporting. There's scenarios there. I mean, there are countless. I mean, you name them. But I would say the big ones, the content is just slop. It doesn't have those EEAT signals. It's not really thorough. It doesn't target keywords properly. It doesn't have good internal linking or navigation components. Is it organized and siloed properly? That's a big one. And then on the other side is the links. Are they just cutting corners? Again, from the agency perspective, one of the most costly things that we do, particularly at rankings, is building links. Because when we write content for a website, we have the control. We can go post it on your website. When we have to link build, a lot of times we have to establish relationships with webmasters. We have to fit their criteria. We have to go through all these unique processes and create the content.
And there's waiting periods and there's time periods of when it's going to go live. Are you negotiating with a PR person, and you're trying to get them to put a do follow link in an article they already covered? There's a lot of nuances and a lot of costs that goes into that. And that's why it's hard. And a lot of times when it's hard, people cut corners. So, if you're going out on your own or want to build your personal brand, it's a really good idea to have a website. Look, you could do something at no cost with Claude and have something up and running. You can have something very cheap. I've mentioned Justia in the past. I think it's like five to 7,000 bucks to get V1. I think a lot of times people want to talk about strategy and their three-year, five-year, 10-year goals.
Guys, it might be Skynet. It might be Terminator 3 land, Terminator 3 land in 10 years. We don't know. The best thing I can tell you, in one of my favorite... You walk into my office, it's on the wall, execution. Don't overthink this. All it is, is guessing. You're just guessing. Create a plan, though, and execute. So, don't overthink it. Your first website's going to be terrible. Your first YouTube video, your first... It doesn't matter. They're all going to be bad. There's a lot of clips. Mr. Beast, go do 100 videos and then I'll tell you, I'll give you some advice. And your 89th video is going to be awful compared to your 800th video. And that's in everything. It could be music, could be sports, could be this, that. Malcolm Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours. Not so sure. Could be 20,000 hours. So, don't overthink. Don't be a ruminator.
Quantity creates quality. You got to put in the reps. Gary V. talks about this. It drives me crazy. Drives me crazy. Look, I'm getting a little... spicing up my team. It's like, do you think one social media post is going to do shit per week? I'm going to be 900 before we get any visibility. Do you even think that one per day is good enough? No? You need to do more. You need to execute. Content's the same way. Links, it's the same way. Reviews is the same way. Distribution on TV, more, more, more, more, more. There's so much white noise. You got to be different. You got to overpower it. You got to execute. So, roll up the sleeves, set that alarm clock at 4:45, get to the office early, knock it out, get it done.
That's it for today. I hope that helped give you some clarity about your site. Stop overthinking the build. You don't need a showstopper site if you don't have the traffic or intake team to support it. What you need is relentless execution and messaging that speaks directly to why your prospect is contacting you. If you're ready to stop guessing and start dominating your market, head on over to Rankings.io to see how we help personal injury law firms sign more cases. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. We'll see you next time.
