[MUSIC PLAYING] Run your law firm the right way. The right way. This is the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking, and Tyson Matrix. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show. All right. Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Today, we have Vitus and Steve from Rise Up Media. And Rise Up Media is Maximum Lawyer's recommended partner for all things digital marketing and SEO. And today, we're going to talk through what it really looks like working with them. But before we get started, I want to mention that we've had Rise Up on the podcast a few times. So if this episode interests you, you can also go back and listen to episodes 490, 567, and 650. So Vitus and Steve, why don't one of you start by introducing yourselves and tell us a bit more about how you help law firms? Sure, I'll go. So I'm Vitus. We've been with Rise Up, or I've been with Rise Up for two and a half years. We are a digital marketing company that specializes in helping law firms, like Becca said, with all things digital. So we do everything from website design, SEO services, Google Ads, LSA ads, social media. So that's basically what we do. A lot of the questions that we have in conversations is the process of how we actually onboard people. So I think we want to kind of go into that a little bit about what we do. So initially our conversations start off with sort of a discovery call, getting an idea of what the firm's about, what they're looking for, what their bandwidth is on taking on new clients, where they want clients from, are they in a large market and a smaller market? So those type of questions and sort of an understanding of what the firm's trying to do, help us give them ideas of a realistic spend and a realistic package of what could accomplish those results for them. Once that is determined and agreed upon, we basically go into an onboarding with them. What that looks like is initially a scheduled call with our team. Steve and I are involved in all of the calls as well. We don't just handle the process and then hand them over to people they've never talked to. We're there before, during, and after the process. But that initial call is us on the call. There's a project manager. There's a design element conversation as well as an SEO specialist. And in conjunction in that conversation, which can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour initially, is a discussion of design ideas. Do you like this? Do you not like this? Maybe you have design elements of what you currently have that can be approved upon. Maybe you have a design that a competitor has that you like certain elements on. We will typically send 50 plus examples if necessary of some of the work that we've done. And all we look for is some feedback of input on colors you like, designs you like, that kind of thing. From a SEO content strategy, we kind of research a little bit about what they're, where they're trying to show up and what needs to be done to get them competitively to show up in that market. And we get guidelines as far as a timeline of what's important first. For example, if they're in a large city, but they also want to go into the outskirts or to the suburban areas outside those cities, there's a prioritization that's done is, what's, where do we do first? We kind of say like own your backyard first and then you can expand upon that. Because one of the things that we do is we write content for our clients every single month. It's not a one and done situation. So that's basically our onboarding process. Steve, I don't know if you want to add anything to that. - Oh, I don't know what to add. But I'm Steve Williams. I've been with rise up going on three years now. I've been in the marketing, digital marketing arena for about 25 years now. So yeah, a lot of people I asked this about the onboarding process, but I think what we do really well is we ask good questions. We always get to question, hey, how many other criminal lawyers are you working with in this area or this geo? And we get that question a lot, but what we have found over the last 20 years is when you really dig in, two criminal law firms are not the same. Some criminal law firms want to concentrate on this area of criminal law, someone federal, someone state, some criminal law firms want to concentrate on DUI, other firms want to concentrate on different criminal searches or different criminal cases. So we do a really good job in our introduction or when we try to get the goals of the firm or we ask good questions. We want to know where do you want to be now? Where do you want to be in 30 days from now, 60 days from now, 90 days from now? And then we will build a product around where they want to be. Just get an expectation, set an expectation because when we set this up, we set it up without contracts. And I think that's probably one of the biggest things we offer. It holds us accountable to the law firm, not the other way around. So in other words, they're not signing a one, two, and three year contract like most marketing companies make you sign. So it holds us accountable. So we really have to have a pretty good idea of what the expectations are of the law firm. And if we don't fill them, they can walk away. And not many people do. We're really proud of our retention rate, not many clients leave once they come on board. And I think that's really what separates us from most other marketing companies is actually getting to know what the client's expectations are. - And let me add one thing to that as well 'cause we have a lot of these conversations about experiences other lawyers have had or the last company they worked with. Another really key differentiator, I think, is that we look at this as a partnership. So for example, if a website is launched, we obviously it takes time for Google to do its thing, but we schedule regular calls of clients to go over performance. And we use analytics. We use call data. We track everything. We're able to show them the process of what we've done and the results that it does through our analytics to show them how we're getting them to rank higher for certain things on certain pages, where their calls are coming from. A lot of firms that I talk to say, hey, I haven't heard from anybody from the company in the last nine months or 12 months. And the only thing I get from them is a request to renew for another year. So sort of going on the tab of what Steve just said is we're month to month, but we're really, really confident in our results. But that also involves a conversation with our clients to show them what we're seeing on our end, as far as what we think we're delivering, and then hearing from them what they're seeing on their end, as far as are you getting the right type of clients? Are you getting people to hire you? And if not, maybe we can figure out why. We've had conversations where we listen to some phone calls that come into the law firm and find that their intake process or the person that's answering the phone could do things better, right? So there's a lot of pieces of this to go from the beginning to the end of someone finding you and somebody hiring you. And we try to give them our professional experience and analysis of every part of that to make sure they have the best chance of getting the client in the door. - Perfect. Okay, if I'm the client and we're just getting started, what do I have to give you or what do I have to give you access to to get started? - Yeah, there's a lot of information. That's an open-ended question. There's a lot of information that can go there. Typically, when we go through a process of one board and a client, they come on board. The first thing we do is we get access to your GMB. If you're hosting your site on a WordPress site, which is about 95% of all websites are hosted on WordPress, we will bring it over and we will host it while we're building a new website. And then we'll take over the GMB. The other thing we do, we clean up a lot of citations. What ball firms don't realize, especially ball firms that have three or four or five attorneys, if they've had a new attorney, they want to order the new attorney from another law firm. There are a lot of citations out there associated with that attorney with other law firms within the community, which Google actually penalizes you for because Google wants everything consistent. They want everything pointing through your home address or your business address, your business phone number. And when you have conflicting information out there, they can penalize you in the search engine results. So bringing over the GMB, kind of cleaning up all the citations is the first thing we do. And then the whole process of building a website is probably, it takes between 60 and 90 days. We say 60 days if they're interactive with us. 90 days if they go into court and we can't find it with a search warrant. So we put that 30 day padding. I've seen them come out as early as 50 days before, but the interaction with the team and our fulfillment team, our project manager, the communication with the law firm, every week, it's not a once a month thing, it's every week, every other day we're sending them information, requesting information surrounding either content or design features. So it really is a true interaction with the law firm. And then once we release you, like you come on board and we release your website, we don't just release you, we release you and we'll have a content strategy call and the content we're gonna be writing moving forward. And we'll introduce you to your account manager who is actively involved sending data, sending your traffic information, your phone call information, so that we make sure that we're on a track upward. In other words, we grow your stats, either incoming phone calls or clicks on Google. We wanna pay attention to that every single month. And we, Vitis and I will have, we'll have either monthly or quarterly meetings with all of our clients. - Yeah, and if I can sort of wrap that up in a simplification process, 'cause a lot of people that I talked are like, "Oh God, I don't wanna go through this again." That took forever last time and I just don't have the time to go through that again. So the clarification there is we do all the work. We do all the content writing, we do all the research, we do all the things that need to be done. We just need participation initially to get an idea of the direction that we need to go. So I tell people like, listen, you give us 30 minutes, 45 minutes on an initial call and we're off to the races. We don't need a whole lot from you at that point until we have something that we need your input or approval on. So it's not a massive time commitment of hours and hours and hours that you don't have time to discuss these things. We take all that work off your plate and we just come back to you when we need some input for moving to the next step. - Perfect, okay, we've kind of hit on this, but I wanna see if there's anything that you guys wanna elaborate on. I was gonna ask, how do you set expectations with your clients about timelines and results? So we see a lot in the group that a lot of lawyers expect or would like quick wins with their marketing. So how do you manage expectations when it comes to SEO, which can be a longer-term strategy? - I'll take this one. - Yeah, you take that, I'll count them. - So expectations are really important and it's probably the most important part of our conversation. And that's ideally because probably everybody we've talked to unless they're just starting out have had expectations given to them that they've failed miserably on. They weren't met. So therefore there's almost a hesitation or a distrust of like the last guy said the same thing how are you any different, right? So what we do, and again, this is part of the process of sort of researching their market. Every market is different, certain markets, it's incredibly, it's gonna be incredibly hard to get them results 'cause there's 20, 30 law firms that are already ahead of them, if you will. I just spoke to someone last week that has two firms they compete with in the small county that they wanna show up in. That's a very different set of expectations, right? So we listen, say the website's gonna take 60 to 90 days, it gets submitted to Google, Google's gotta do its, you know, optimization or its crawling of the website, its analytics need to get out there and it takes time. That's part of the process of us having conversations as this is happening with the law firm so that even if they maybe don't see a huge hit from the beginning, we can show them that they're starting to get results on Google, they're climbing up the rankings, they're starting to get calls. So that's the SEO standpoint of it. A lot of our clients are in a situation where like, what can I do right now to start generating revenue? Because obviously I'm gonna have to pay for the website, they understand it's a longer return on investment cycle. So running things like local service ads, which in a lot of markets, surprisingly, it's incredibly non-competitive, where as in the larger markets, it can be incredibly competitive, especially for something like personal injury. But you can turn on local service ads assuming you haven't established Google My Business. And ideally, you could start getting calls within two or three days. And so that's sort of a stop gap for a lot of the firms that we've talked to is as we're building you your website and going through this process, you can do something that's gonna start making your phone ring almost immediately, pick the categories of things you wanna show up for. And the way that the LSA ads work is, in a lot of cases, unless it's a long-tail search, it's at the top of a page of Google for everything. So you can literally tell Google, I wanna get phone calls for these five types of categories and start generating clients and revenue as we're building the long-term process of your website and getting that to show up. - And I'll take that a step further. A lot of it has to do with analysis and of the market, analysis of competition and Google. So if you go to anyone, either the two analytical tools, ARF, AHRFS or SEMrush, it'll tell you what the authority score of any domain is. So it's a lot different if somebody comes to us and they're a brand new law firm, they just partnered up, they might have been practicing for 20 years, but they created a new URL. Well, their domain authority score might be a five or a four. And typically we wanna see anywhere from a 17 to 20. That's when Google actually will start indexing you a little quicker and a little faster. But if you start with a five, it's gonna take a while. On the other hand, if we go to a law firm that has a good backlinks, they have thousands of backlinks and they have a domain authority of 35, that's something that we get excited about because that just tells me that their website is gonna index a lot quicker than somebody with a domain authority score of five and maybe a hundred backlinks. So it's creating the expectations and really doing an analysis of the market and look at the backend of their website and find out, okay, where do we need to go? What do we need to prioritize? We need to prioritize content or do we need to prioritize backlinks? Or do we, as white as says, do we just get them in the LSA ads so they can start getting phone calls immediately? - Another thing I'll say is, well, that we try to give them an idea of what the potential is in their market. So one of the things that we do is we not only give them an analysis of what they're currently doing and sort of how Google sees their website today is that we will take a look at their competition, see who's actually showing up where they wanna show up, give them an idea of how much traffic they're getting, how many backlinks, all this backend stuff to show them kind of like where we need to get to be competitive with those law firms and an interesting thing happens is like, well, that's great and all, but my real competitor is this law firm. Can we look at them? And sometimes it's interesting when you put in what they think is their largest competitor and a lot of times they're even worse than the firms we're talking about. So it's kind of like the assumption of competition versus the reality of competition can sometimes be two very different things. For us, your competition is who's online and who's being found when they're being searched for the things that you want. That can be different than who you think is your competitor in the courtroom. So we try to explain that to them as well. - That is super interesting. Okay, I think this was a really great segue too into my next question, which is, how do you track and measure success for your clients and how often do you report back to them? I'm also wondering, is your reporting, if I'm a client, am I getting an email, a report? Do I have a dashboard? Steve just mentioned SEMrush and Steve, everything you just said was great. I loved all the descriptions, but I'm thinking if someone is brand new to this, a lot of that might have been a little high level. So let's like break it down for me. Just break it all down. - Well, there's a couple of analytical tools out there on one line that most agencies like ours use. And any agency doesn't matter if it's somebody building websites for law firms or chiropractors or plumbers. It's A-H-R-S, which it's a little bit more, it tracks all the analytics of how many Google visits, how many backlinks do they have, what's your domain? How does Google view your website in a matter of strength? When I talk about domain authority, it's usually, there's three things that Google looks at for URL, it's A-H Trust, like there's never been any bad linking associated with that URL, how long it's been on Google, and are you putting out content on a regular basis? Those are the three things Google looks at. Because Google really doesn't care about anybody, but they want to give a good user experience. So when somebody does a search and a search bar, they want to bring back the most relevant information. They think that person's looking for. 'Cause they don't care who it is, they just want to make sure it's relevant information to give a good user experience. So that person continues to use Google in the future, right? That's why they have about a 90, 92% domination rate over all the other search engines, right? I think 90% of people use Google. But it's the same for everything else. So we look at a lot of things, and it comes with that expectation. So we have to, we set expectations differently, depending on, 'cause we do a really good, like Biden said, a competitive analysis of who compete, who they want to compete with online. Not who they're competing with down the street, or who they think is an equivalent attorney to them or a lawyer to them. And we want to make sure that, I'll tell you the one thing that we do do. Once we do a competitive analysis, if we make a recommendation to a law firm, this is what you're going to have to do minimally to compete for you to get a return on your investment. If they make a decision that they want to spend less than that, we won't work with. Because we, for one, I got to pay my designers, I got to pay my writers and messio team, and if they leave within eight, nine months, we're going to lose money. But the other is, we don't want anything bad associated with rise up media. We take pride in our reputation, we take pride in our retention rate. And I think the reason we have such a high retention rate is because we will not sell a product, we know that it's not going to work. We will make a recommendation based on what we feel comfortable with them making a return on their investment, the five to one, the three to one, whatever they're looking for. If they don't want to get in at that investment, won't answer any questions, we'll guide them the right way and help them make a decision, or help their law firm in any way we can, but we won't work with them unless they're willing to meet where we know what we're comfortable that they're going to get the expectations on return. If that makes sense. - Yeah. - So let me kind of take that and sort of simplify it a little bit. 'Cause I think your question was, as a client, what do you see, what do you get, right? - Yeah. - So you do get a monthly report that shows basically a link to your website analytics. You do get call rail analytics to show what you're getting. Bluntly, most people don't look at this unless we are going over it with them, right? There are a few that get into the weeds and they're, when we get on a call with them, they've already done all this stuff. But you do have access through credentials, logging credentials to your own analytics and those sorts of things. But that's the reason that we actually have very regular conversations because some of it is confusing. Some of it, what does that mean? Nobody wants to get into the weeds. Like, I don't want to know how my meal was made, I just want to eat it, right? So the recipe, the behind the scenes, what went into it, I don't really care. Just show me what I need to see. So to answer that question, you get very constant communication that's digital, that's sent to you. And then conversations with Steve and I on a very regular basis to interpret that data. The other thing is every client I work with has my cell phone. Sometimes they text me a question, "Hey, this happened or I read this." So we have a very, we'll call it a lifeline or a, you know, a way for quick communication if there's a question versus, you know, send me an email and maybe I have time to talk to you. We're very transparent and available to our clients, which is also something that they really appreciate. - One more thing to answer the question even further is we have analytics, the clients have access to tell them how many visitors they got, where they came from, did they come from Google, where they had LSA call, what they typed in to Google to get to their website. It tells how many visits, how many people refer to you. It tells you the referrals that refer to you, what pages they looked at, what pages they clicked into on. So we can go, if you're somebody that likes to look at analytics, this is the tool for you because you can get into the weeds to say, okay, I had seven people click on this page of content and came into my website just by this search. So we're pretty transparent. I think the one thing that a lot of the bigger marketing companies do, they lump everything together and say, well, you got 300 visitors this month. We'll tell you how many visitors came from Google, how many came from Bing, we'll tell you how many people came from your GMB, we'll tell you if they came from a directory, we'll track PPC for everybody, we'll track your LSA calls. So we're pretty transparent. But what we find is most attorneys just want to know if they write me a check, there will get five dollars in return. - And I'll add one more thing to that 'cause this constantly happens where I'll ask somebody, like, hey, do you get analytics from your current provider? They either say, yes, I never look at it, or I look at it, I don't know what it means, or it's all just thrown into a bucket, right? And in some case, I think it's almost done on purpose to sort of just say, hey, this is, you're getting all this, it doesn't matter where it's coming from. My argument to that would be, you absolutely want to know where it's coming from. Is it coming for what you're spending on Google? Is it coming from your website spend? You need to know what's generating the kind of clients and phone calls that you want. A big sort of a term that's thrown out there these days by a lot of these companies is impressions. And impressions is the biggest, I'm just gonna say BS analytic that's out there. And impression is if a car drove past your office, had no intention of stopping, just happened to be driving past the road, they consider that an impression to your law firm. Has no relevance to that person ever seeing you, needing you or ever desiring to talk to you. And I've seen emails come across like, hey, this is what they sent me. Oh, you had 300,000 impressions this month. It's useless, it has meaningless value, but to someone that doesn't know the terminology, it can be spun to say like, oh, that's fantastic. So there's a relevance of us talking to them and helping them understand what is relevant and what isn't and what's actually gonna move the needle for the law firm. - Perfect, okay, that was fabulous. All right, before we switch gears, I'm wondering do you guys have anything else you want to add about the process of working with you guys? - Steve, I don't know. - Well, I think we should add an element of, we have a lot of law firms that want to work with us, but they want to ask somebody or speak to somebody we work with and we will send them a list of 50 names and we'll tell them to call anybody. We won't say, hey, call this while you're calling it. Just pick up the film and call anybody. Here's a list of 50 websites and you pick one, you call them and ask what it's like we're working with Rise Up Media. And we also have the one else, we have obviously, we have a lot of clients that say, tell anybody to call me. I just read an email before I got on here, Doug Edwards, we took the dinner in Vegas last week. He said, by the way, if you have anybody that has any questions about what you guys do, have them call because you all have changed my life, which is really what's-- - And you know what on that I'm gonna say, having done this for 25 years, only since Rise Up and having the type of relationships that we have now are, we literally take people to dinner, we go to these trade shows and the feedback that we get on like just, you guys are just different than anybody I've ever worked with. You guys actually deliver on what you say. You didn't hand me off to someone and disappear. Like the appreciation of our involvement and our continued involvement, which to me shouldn't be a big deal, but it is. Because most of these other marketing companies out there, they kind of do something one time and then they put it on Cruise Control, they never look at it and there's no consistent element of performance analytics or continued adding to the website with whether it's content, social media or anything else, it's just left alone. We do things differently and it's appreciated. So that's always a nice conversation to have. - I absolutely agree. That's what I was gonna say is it really does show that you guys are doing it differently and you're really putting in the effort to do it differently and that is what our law firm owners need. So we also appreciate that you guys are doing what you're doing. - Yeah, I think we take it personal. Like, we both work for a very large company that only time our phone ring was when somebody wanted to complain and now our phone rings with people saying, "Man, I don't know what you're doing, but keep it up." And it's just, it's a good place to be. It's a great, you know, we work for a company that says, "Guys, we just need your help "and then put the hub broke faster and better "while keeping the quality the same." And we want to keep it the funnest place you've ever worked while you make as much money as you've ever made, which is, who doesn't want to work for that? - Absolutely. I mean, it's one of the best work environments that I've ever worked in and that goes back a long way. - That's so great, I love that. Okay, we're going to touch on one strategy topic though, today, Vitus, are you still good with that? - Yeah. - Okay, so what is the importance of what people see when they find them? We're going to dive into that. - Yeah, this is probably the most important piece of advice or thought process that someone needs to think about. Attorneys, a lot of them, hey, I get a lot of referrals, I get my business coming from here, or people find me this way or that way. The promise I can make is the first impression that whoever you're looking to have hire you, the first impression they're going to have a view is probably your website or your Google reviews, or whatever shows up, if I Google you, what's on that first page? You, as a law firm or a lawyer, need to make sure that that first page is bulletproof. It's everything from your LinkedIn profile to your reviews on Google to your reviews on anywhere, anywhere else that you're listed, whether it's lawyers.com or Avo or whatever else, because typically they're not going to just look at one thing, they may go down that entire page to see if they see anything positive or negative. The other thing that's really important is if they hit your website, what does that website say about you? Is it a good representation of your current law firm, your expertise, your ability to get results, verdicts and settlements, that sort of thing? A lot of times when I bluntly asked that question, they kind of go, not really. So that alone should be a critical element of you deciding that that should put your best foot forward, if you will. You're also going to be compared to somebody. Even if you get referred by somebody, they're probably getting two or three referrals as well, and they're going to pull up your competition. So how do you stand up versus that other law firm? Is your website look like it's 10 years old, or is it current? Is the content on it current? I see websites that even look good, and you click on their blog post, and it's the latest post is five years old. That sends a really bad message. Like what else on this website's five years old? So it's really important. Your website is a living, breathing extension of your law firm, and should be treated as if that's the front door to your actual office. It needs to put your best foot forward, and be the convincing element of why somebody should hire you. - Yeah, I'm going to piggyback on that, because it really is, I've never spoken to a law firm that didn't say the majority of their business comes from referrals. And if somebody's referred to you as a law firm, the first thing somebody's going to see is your website, 95% of the time. Nobody's going to walk through the door. The first impression is your law firm, and I've always done the question to law firms out. I'll say if the client of your lifetime is on the other end of the phone, and they ask what your web address is, what's your reaction? Are you happy to give them your website? Does your website truly display the core competencies of your law firm? - You know, a lot of lawyers, I've sat with, I've sat with a lot of lawyers that have a really, really good expectation. They're really good lawyers. But when you pull up their website, it's a little square box. It looks like it was built in 1999. It hasn't changed. Like Biden said, the blogs are 10 years old, the picture of the attorneys, 15 years old and grainy. It doesn't take a lot. It's not expensive to build a website that really shows your law firm and matches your actual reputation to your own odd reputation. And it's one of the most important thing you do is protect the people that are free of these, right? You pay a lot of money to get clients who don't know who you are. The potential clients are referred to you. It's, you should spend money on protecting those. You know, 'cause there's a lot of law firms out there that have bad websites that really don't know how much money they lost because people refer to them in two other law firms and they chose other law firms. And that number would probably scare the crap out of a lot of law firms of how much business they lost just by not having an updated website. - Yeah, every conversation with like, how many referrals do you close? Everybody we talk to, we get 100% of that business. Well, that's great, but how many of those people never talk to you that got referred to you? You'll never know. So to Steve's point, don't let your website be a deterrent to them to actually contact you. - That's perfect. All right, guys, if anybody wants to reach out to you, how should they do that? - Yeah, you can give us a call, a text. Our emails are my name's V-A-I-D-A-S at RiseUpMedia.com and that's RiseUpWithA-Z. Steve's is Steve at RiseUpMedia.com. My cell phone number is 704-953-7051. Steve. - We're one, two, seven, one, three, two, seven, six, four. And I will throw it out there. Back to if somebody wants us to do a competitive analysis of their online competition in their metro or their GEO where they want business, we'll do it for free. We won't hand them with sales calls or phone calls or emails. We'll send it to them for free. We don't even need to talk to them. They do send us an email and say, hey, can you tell me how I'm doing in my market for criminal law or family law or be happy to send them a competitive analysis? - Yeah, and on that point, at the bottom of this podcast, I'm sure Beck is gonna put our contact information. We have an intake form that you can email us that way as well. So there's multiple ways to get a hold of us, but to Steve's point, listen, we're here to help you. We don't chase you. We're not gonna have any obligation with the information that we provide. But what really seems to be helpful with people is not only will we take a look at what you're currently doing and maybe point out some areas that you could do better, but we'll even analyze your competitive market and your competitors to see what they're doing that you're not. And at that point, you have all of the options and things on the table that you potentially could be doing and we can help you determine potentially what you wanna do to fill in the gaps. But we do this without any obligation. We'll be happy to do it for free and give you an idea of sort of what's behind the curtain. - Perfect. All right. You guys reach out to Vitus or Steve at their emails and take advantage of that analysis. Thank you guys. - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer bot card. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to maximumlawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
