This episode is supported by Cleo, the leading practice management software for solo small and mid-sized law firms. Visit cleo.com/lunch to see why 150,000 legal professionals use Cleo to manage and grow their firm. Everyone, sometimes one of the things I get asked is why are you and Gee such good friends and Gee, I know I'm blindsided you with this banter intro. But you and I had dinner the other evening with a third party. Do you want to share the awkward dinner that I tried to uninvite myself from that you insisted I come along with and has then turned into a typical Gee Conrad interaction? I don't think it was awkward at all. I know this is why it's wonderful. People don't get this. It's great. Go ahead, share the story. We were having dinner in Seattle and we'll leave the third party anonymous. We can leave the third party anonymous but we should say this is a good friend of mine, good friend of Gee's and soon to be ex-GNGF client. Okay, fair. We'll see maybe. But that's kind of the story is that, you know, we're like, "Hey, you make a decision. We think that you might be in a bad spot." And then the awkward part is how we tripped over each other, complimenting each other, and telling this person, like, "I was telling them they should hire you and your time they should hire me." And ultimately, they should hire whoever is the best fit for them. That's right. Yeah, I mean, we're aligned on that. We're aligned on that value. Do the right thing. So it was very, very cool. I don't know how many times you've ever been on a dinner pitch with your competitor. And we both tried to kind of back off on it. It's just the way Gee and I work and I think that's-- Why are businesses are so small? It's hard Conrad. What else are we talking about today? So we've got a long news segment brought to you by some breaking news that you may find somewhat redundant. After that, we're going to go deep on legal directories and whether or not you should be spending your time and money thinking about them. P-E makes the world go around. Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice. Here on Legal Talk Network. [Music] All right, Gee. There's a lot of shenanigans going on in the digital and legal world. There's a lot that we have to cover in news. We're going to do a long news segment before we get to our directory conversation. [Music] All right, there's a big spat that really impacts all of my clients and I suspect all of your clients. A spat between WP Engine and WordPress. WP Engine is a managed WordPress host and WordPress is the de facto default preferred and really only answer for a website platform. Unless you've chosen to gone with Scorpion and Handcuff yourself to a proprietary platform. But that's from a different episode. Gee, what's going on between WP Engine and WordPress? This is actually a much bigger mess than even if you're a WP Engine client. Matt Mullenweg, I apologize, I'm not pronouncing his last name correctly, but he's the godfather of WordPress. But WordPress is open source. It's an open source platform for web publishing. It's got a global community of developers that build the core files, they build plugins. I think I've read somewhere that's like 40% of the webs on WordPress. I don't know if that's right, I don't have a source for that. I think the New York Times is on WordPress. A lot of companies on WordPress. And by view of it, I'm on Team WP Engine on this because I think it kind of breaks the entire ecosystem what Mullenweg's doing. But my view is that he's like WP Engine is making all this money and they're not contributing enough back to the WordPress community. There's really no contractual obligation that anybody contributes back, but he's picking on WP Engine. And here's the thing, regardless of how this plays out in the long run, he's created all of this instability on certainty on WordPress. I know people, site owners that are jumping off of WordPress just because it's like we can't be a part of this mess. And not to quote Kanye here, but no one man should have all the power. I mean, he's really destabilized the entire WordPress ecosystem in my opinion. What are you telling clients right now? So we're telling clients this, which is what we usually do when something comes up. Don't panic right now. Don't do any things wait and see mode, so wait and see. But like we're learning how to manage, because all of our clients are on WordPress, all of our hosting and managed hosting is on WP Engine, right? That is just across the board. We may have a couple of outliers, but so is this a problem? Is this going to be a big term problem? And the answer is it actually might be. Yes, because I think for people who are, if you're on WP Engine, say, forget about whether you're Conrad and Geekline, but if you're on WP Engine, WordPress cut off access from WP Engine to their repository to do things like security patches and stuff. They've restored that since, but this is, you know, this is a kind of like mutually assured destruction type of gamesmanship that they're playing here to negotiate. And if they turn it off again, you know, WP Engine's made some reassurances that they have workarounds, but no one wins here. Nobody wins. I think they're going to figure, I think they're going to sort it out. Well, it is mutually assured destruction, and there's no upside for either of them. It's just a self-inflicted wound. It does open the door, I think, for a different platform. I know I heard pressables giving massive discounts to migrate from WP Engine, but again, the point is it doesn't matter. Pressable will be the next target. It's just when you get a big enough target, he's coming after you. Anyway, for our listeners, being actionable and helpful, key and Conrad say, don't do anything. Don't panic, we will take care of it. If and when it becomes a major problem, this is a-- We'll switch it to Squarespace. I thought you were going to say we'll switch it to Scorpion because they won't have this problem because it's their own closed system. I mean, if I'm Scorpion, this actually looks pretty good right now. It does. It does. Okay, moving on from that stuff, ads showing up in the AIOs. You called this last episode or the episode before? I've been talking about this longer than people have wanted to talk about it. Google has to keep up in this AI arms race and they're a one-trick pony and ads is their trick and they're putting ads in the AIOs. And I think that if they get it figured out where they're still hitting their revenue targets with the ads in the AIOs, you're going to see an uptick in AIOs showing up. I think we're already starting to see that and some of the recent click-through rate studies that I've seen is that, and this is the problem, is that the AIOs decrease ad clicks by 20% or something. Google doesn't want that. They'll figure that out. They'll figure it out. They're going to put-- you're just going to see ads in the AIOs. It's just going to be sponsored. Listen, that's a UX issue. So, Gee called this a while ago. The other thing to note is those ads are showing up from your Google Ads account and there's nothing extra special you have to do with that. There's also no way to know what's triggering those ads. So, we are continuing this theme of we don't know what the fuck is going on because we're not showing you anything. -There's our app on for the day. -There's our-- oh, I'm going to draw you to, by the way, dear listener, if you're sitting there in traffic wondering whether or not you should move over to PODS of America or continue to listen to Gee and Conrad, Gee is heated. He is two cups of coffee in and he is heated. -So, this is more-- -To Americanos. -To Americanos. I don't even know what that means. -Not just coffee. That's a spress. -That's too spress. -I thought that was the worst. -It was worse. -Voted for Trump. -Oh. -Anyway, sorry. Ah, political humor too. Okay, moving on. The big news of the day is the internet brand's acquisition of fine law. This just hit and we're going to spend a little bit of time after the news segment talking more in much more detail about directories in general, but under the guise of this internet brand's fine law acquisition. -Well, this is messed up. This is messed up because Conrad talked about this before it happened. So, he knows something or somebody. I don't know, but he was talking about this. Adam, play the clip. -We talk about that even in our agencies. In fact, I can point to episodes where you've said we have an advantage as agencies because we have data and I think there's no doubt that Scorpion is arguably most data in digital legal. My issue is that-- -Except for internet brands. -All right, internet brands. -Who takes it from all over the place. -Okay. -Well, and I believe, and this holds true for-- At the risk of throwing crap at everyone in the market right now, this is true for internet brands, and all of the brands underneath internet brands, it's also true for Scorpion. I believe they are optimizing for the system. They are not optimizing for Bill and Jane, the attorney. -So, if you didn't listen to the last episode, that's a clip from our prior episode before all this news came out, and I'm not going to put Conrad on the spot, but it sure seems like Conrad had some kind of inside knowledge about this. I know, Conrad, do you have any statements you want to make about this? -I think we should keep moving on. -This is like deep throat stuff. This is like Nixon Watergate stuff. -So, we did launch the pod right before the acquisition was announced. If you want to draw those dots-- -Something's going on there. -Go ahead. Conrad's going to get some kind of email. He's going to get someone's going to show up at Conrad's place of work. -Anyway, moving on. -Okay. -The interesting thing there, as I was re-listening to that clip, I think the quote was all of the brands underneath internet brands. -Like Avo? -Like Avo. We can get into-- -Didn't you used to work at Avo? -We're going to come back to this in our directory conversation. There's a whole bunch of stuff about Avo. But you pointed this out to me earlier. I looked at the internet brands listings under legal. There's NOLO, Avo, Martindale, lawyers.com, and CAPTORA. It seems like there's some missing brands. Did they divest of total attorneys and/or engage key? -Well, I double-check that they, for sure, still are listed as the-- and then footer and engage. And so they must have read your blog post and got a little cold feed about publicizing their ownership of Engage. -And the reason for that-- -Good job, Conrad. -For those of you who are new listeners, I don't know if this has anything to do with me. But the Engage Chat platform tries to determine whether or not you are a good client for that law firm. And if they don't, they try and resell that leads through these family of literally internet brands in legal space. I don't think that's very seemingly. So that's a whole different pod that we did. We'll find the link to that one as well. -And now all the fine law customers will have access to those Engage leads. -That's exactly right. So, Gee, why do you think they made this purchase? -Well, I have no idea why they made the purchase. No, this is their model, right? What did Mark Whitehead say? -Oh, you're getting-- okay. -All right. We'll wait for after the break, after the break. -Well, after the break? Other things in the news, if you are listening to this on Wednesday in the greater DC area, Ben Glass and I are hanging out tomorrow, Thursday, October 11th or 12th, whatever the Thursday is. Come join us at Ben Glass's office, pizza, beer, conversation about digital marketing. And also, I was psyched-- I haven't written for Search Engine Land in over a decade. Gee and I have talked a lot about the increasing cost for pay-per-click due to the brand conflation issue. There's a great Search Engine Land article on brand conflation and why it is driving your overall pay-per-click budget. -Yeah, you actually was awesome. I had a world's colliding because our other agency that's outside of legal, your article popped up in Slack feed and I was like, "Oh, Conrad, nice job." It is super gratifying. People still reading Search Engine Land, even Danny Sullivan left it years and years and years ago. -Go check it out. Now let's take a break. -Hey, lunch hour listeners, do you know where your best leads come from? And when they come in, are you confidently converting each one into a client? -CallRail makes this easy with call tracking and analytics that show law from switch marketing drives their best leads so they can optimize campaigns and maximize ROI. -Thanks to CallRail's detailed call data, lawyers never miss a prospective client or an opportunity to grow their practice efficiently. -CallRail can help you transform your lead process so you can focus on your practice. -Go to callrail.com/lunchhour now and try it for free. -Hey, Guy, one of our favorite sources for all things legal is Clio's legal trends report for solo and small law firms. One of the data points that they cite is that the solo firms using online payments get paid two times faster than those accepting only checks. -And in fact, the data shows that you can shorten your collection cycle by at least 35% just by using online payments. -So check out the report. It goes deep into trends and strategies to grow your practice, improve client satisfaction, and streamline your operations. -Download Clio's 2024 legal trends report for solo and small law firms today at Clio.com/trends and start transforming your practice. -Again, that's Clio.com/trends. All right, Guy, now this is not the first time we've done a deep dive into the question around the value of legal directors. We covered this back in 2022 and I'm wondering if things have fundamentally changed or if we're going to be giving the same advice. What do you think? -Well, you know, look, as we talked in the pre-show, I didn't want to waste everybody's time talking about another legal acquisition. I think there are some obvious market forces that lawyers should be wise to, right? Like consolidation of these platforms means less choice. It means more leverage for the ad platforms in terms of, you know, we're talking about data last time. This might be the only company that has more data perhaps than legal than Scorpion does. -I think they have a lot more data. I think they have a lot more variety of data than Scorpions. Given some of the brands that they own and work with, for example, I'll use Engage as another example. -Total attorneys. -I think they have a lot more journeys. There's a lot more data available to them. Internet brands as a whole has kind of made a business of doing a better-ish job with SEO, with these large brands, and then milking them as a cash count, right? That's really the model, and it has worked for them over time. I don't know how well it worked for the clients, but it has worked for the MBAs running Internet brands. -Yeah, so we get a variety, you know, the labor. We didn't want this to feel like a, "Oh, you know, can we have Engage? What was me? There's all this consolidation going on." But again, one is the heads up. Same thing we said last time. I think lawyers need to be aware of this, of what's going on in the marketplace so they can make informed decisions about this stuff. But two, there are tangible consequences, and there are things that are going to impact like, "Hey, you're a practicing lawyer. You're having lunch. You listen to lunch, our legal marketing. We want to give you, like, some tactical things that you should be thinking about to put to work in your firm in the context of this thing." And so a lot of people think about fine lunch. Us included, you know, Conrad, famous for his fine law jailbreak guide. We think of fine law as a website, a law from website and SEO and media managed, like an agency, right? We think of fine laws like one of the bigger, longer-standing agencies. But the other thing that people are probably familiar with fine law in the lawyer context is that they've got this giant finelaw.com directory of lawyers, and they have paid listings. And so that's what we're going to focus on today. And Conrad, you actually have, you were just recently asked about, you know, serendipitously. You were just recently asked by a client about directories. So give us the question. I'm going to ask the question, but this is a question that all of you ask at least once a year. This is another Internet Brands property. This was around Martindale Hubble. This is an internal question. Martindale Hubble, a legal director we've been in since before I started, is increasing its prices for accounts like ours. With X number of attorneys listed, we are paying about $204 a month for each profile. The new listing is $260 a month. It's things that their prices are increasing so dramatically for us this year. But Martindale Hubble comes up high-ish in searches and their website has a strong 84 rating for backlinking. Should I do this? How would you go about assessing Gee, whether or not, what would your advice be to my client? I'll bill them $450 an hour for your insight. How would you tell my client or a client that you have whether or not they should spend this money? Well, in fact, as we were prepping for this, I have an email that was forward to me from one of our clients. No. From Martindale, no, no, no. This is from the, I guess it's their wrap. I wanted to mention the Martindale no-low profile, which is included on a standalone basis, is of great value because when we link back to your website through anchor text, follow through links. Follow through links. Have you heard of follow through links? Follow through. It's helpful because we are authoritative, longstanding and relevant. And so, you know, to your client's point, there's this view of like, oh, we're getting these links. Now, let's do the SEO part first. Okay. I am pro in a vacuum, organic citations and links in a directory profile. Like, forgetting about paying for them. Like, you will claim your profile on major directories, like avo, finelaw, lawyers.com. There's no question that being visible on vertical specific legal directories with your correct business information and a backlink has value to SEO. Then the question is like, well, net net, what is the value? Can I back you up one question before we get to the money on this? Yeah. You said major directories. Yeah, right. You're for our dear listener. Explain why you made that qualifying word when you talked about directories. Because like every other website, I can start, you know, geezlegaldirectory.com and charge you $100 a month for a listing there and it'll have zero value. You know, these directories are the ones that show up for head-term searches. We'll get into more of that when we get into the lead assessment thing. But, you know, we know that Google thinks these directories are relevant to legal. They rank for competitive legal queries. And so, yeah, we know that those are sources of authority from these sites. So, you know, to -- So tactically, hold on. I'm going to get you tactical again. How would our dear listener determine whether or not something is a major legal directory or a fly-by-night? I just started something out of Uzbekistan. I mean, the easiest way if you're like novice, easy way is just to go see if it ranks for anything, right? I mean, in my viewpoint, like, if you want to simplify link building, the most relevant links are on the pages that rank for the query, right? Like, that's -- Google's telling you, we think this is relevant for the query because we're putting it in our results. So, whether it's right or wrong, that's what Google thinks, that's Google's perspective of it. Okay. Getting your business listed on those directories is major legal ones that rank, like, no question that has value. The hard part is, and again, we're focusing on the SEO part first, is, all right, how much should I spend on it? That's the trick of your part. Now, I would say, you know, to your client, is your client, you know, quote-unquote, "market dominating law firm"? Or is your client, you know, I got a couple thousand bucks a month to spend on internet marketing because to me, all of the resource deployment has to be thought of in the context of their objectives and their overall budget. And again, your client, I can't remember in the question, did they share the pricing? Yes, it is $260 a month for an attorney profile. Plus -- Okay. Hold on, this is weird. The new pricing is $260 a month for the first attorney profile plus $35 for each additional attorney. This is actually interesting. Buy and bulk. Well, it's the buy and bulk, but there's an SEO implication to this as well. That is really a fascinating way to look at it. $260 a month plus $35 for each additional attorney. So they're time out on $6,000 a year to spend on these directory listings. Do it or not, Guy. Okay. Does that $6,000 represent 100% of this firm's marketing budget or 1% of this firm's marketing budget? Okay. Probably do it. Probably do the base profile. Also, where is the visibility? Like, what's the difference between the free version? Like, are they getting a bunch more pages of links? Because they're diminishing returns, in my opinion, right? So that's the other challenge with this. Can you go into the diminishing returns of these links? And why is Martindale charging $260 for the first attorney and $35 for each additional attorney from an SEO perspective? Yeah. They're pitching more links the better. And that's not necessarily the case. Now, there's arguments about like, you know, is this -- do they have multiple locations? Because then you can say, well, geographically targeted anchors might be more valuable if it's, you know, not all going to the same place. But I would say as a general rule of thumb, and I know that people disagree with me on this, I'm much more focused on total number of linking root domains than I am on overall number of links. Bingo. So that first link, that if you have nothing for Martindale no low, that first link is actually pretty valuable. Second link less so, the 200 in the second link, even less so. The caveat I would say to that is, is that if one is on a bunch of pages about car accidents and then the second one's about a bunch of pages about something other different topic, like there's some argument to say, well, you want some diversity in the topical nature of the anchors and also look at it. These are profiles, right? These are -- That's the thing. Remember, the profiles, the profiles get thrown up on these topically and geographic -- we'll dive into one of the actual directory pages, but, you know, it'll be like forward slash Chicago forward slash car accident. And then if you're like forward slash Dallas forward slash car accident, and those are linking to different internal pages on your site and you're using different internal pages in your Google business profiles, that's where you start being like, well, there's geographic relevance things that you want to think about, and so anyway, this got more nuance than I think we intended. No, that's great. I think overall, my view is, is that major directories, there's going to be some threshold number of investment you probably should be making. What that number is should be in the context of your overall marketing budget, in my opinion. People will also that are listening, if you're a little more sophisticated, you can be like, but wait, Gee, these are no followed links. A lot of them are no followed links. That's another thing that we'll talk about in a second. You know, the reps email is certainly misleading in terms of both Google's guidelines as well as an SEO person will look at that email and be like, there's an implication that these are followed back links for SEO purposes. And most of the ones that even dies check before pre-show on a lot of these directories, most of them are either no followed or sponsored, right? Hey, Gee, what's a no followed or sponsored link? Why are you making the distinction? Yeah, they're just so that's that's a you know, the way I say a lot of people have jumped on. I love this terminology. But I think this is Google's line on this is that no follow and sponsored our suggestions to Google that these links should not be counted in terms of ranking. I will say this. I don't buy it for a second. All right. That was my next follow up question. Yeah. Wikipedia links are no followed, like maybe we could argue there's some kind of dampening or something. Google's official line as they don't count. But remember, Google is a data machine. It's a very resource intensive endeavor to index the entire web. And so if they're indexing it, you know, if they've got a page that's index and that link is index and it's showing, you know, you're seeing it in search console and you're seeing it when you look for, you know, site colon queries and they're actually like spend Google spending resources to keep it in the index, you're doing something with it, in my opinion. Well, the no follow thing, like it used to be very real, right? It used to be binary. It was on or off and the no follow thing was absolutely real thing. When I got into this game, this is a long time ago, the no follow links were called link condoms, right? Yeah. And I think the industry overthought that though. I think that there was a little. But you know, but you're right. So what happened is the industry tried to use and abuse and manipulate no follow on links and then Google started looking away from it. There was another question that you were given the other day. This was about kind of cloaking H one texts for a or sorry, it was title tag text, how to write a title tag that is good for SEO, but actually have a title on the page that shows up for the user. And a long time ago, Google decided like, Hey, we're going to look at what the actual formatting is on the page as opposed to what you may or may not have as your actual code. Same thing happened with no follows, they're using what they know. The notion that Wikipedia links are no followed and therefore Google doesn't think about it when it is the most curated side on the web. That is, is, is laughable. Let's say a quick break. Join us on a journey through time as we examine 10 of the most famous trials in history in our new podcast, many series in dispute. We'll look at the Salem witch trials, the Boston massacre trials, the infamous 1919 Chicago Black Sox trial, and many others. We will bring to life these courtroom battles through the reenactment of actual courtroom testimony, so join me, Craig Williams, your narrator, as we look at 10 famous cases that turned out quite differently than most people predicted at the time. Follow In Dispute from Legal Talk Network on your favorite podcasting app. Let me guess, you're either drowning in paperwork or juggling too many tasks at once, and that's where I come in. I have nearly 30 years of experience as a practicing attorney, and I am inviting the most brilliant people I know on my podcast to help you accomplish everything for mastering time management to attracting clients with an impressive marketing campaign. So if you want to take your law firm to the next level, search "Unbillable Hour" on your favorite podcast app and start listening today. All right, and we're back. So let's parse the second part of this question. All right, which is the business value from a client generation, it's advertising, right? So let's do the math, right? It's $6,000 a year. And let's put the SEO aside, you know, the relative value of the SEO, that's a little bit more subjective. If it's a small part of your budget, probably we're doing a lot of cases. Let's go into just the client development, like, are these ads, because they're ads and sponsored listings, are they generating cases or not? Okay. Well, let's see what it's got to do. What's the value of a client here in this context? What practice are we in? Oh, this is personal injury, right? So you can make the very easy assessment. One client pays for a self key. Okay. Well, let's do cost per case. Okay. So cost per case, $6,000 cost per case. You got to get two clients a year out of this to make it even even sniffle. Okay. Right. I agree. I think I would be, we actually talked about this at advocacy 360 and I kind of poo pooed it. But if you want a simple metric to use, you know, use the $2,000 Mendoza line cost per client, you need three clients. You need three clients for this to happen. Then now you're into the harder part, which is, is how do you track this? How do you actually do attribution for this directory? So Conrad, how would you tell this client? What do we have to have in place in order for us to actually be able to figure out the cost per client from this directory? So there's a couple of things. Number one, the directory needs to have a tracking phone number. Okay. That has to be a part of the game, which most of the time they actually want because they want to be able to tell you that they made your phone ring, even if it was just a pizza guy, right? Yeah. One thing to do. I don't know where you are on this. Do you have the ad platforms tracking number forward to a call rail number or do you have it forward? We always use call rail. Otherwise, you have to believe what the fox is telling you, right? Tell them that because so, so, so hold on for people that don't know, we're laughing about here, explain, explain, because we've lost everyone. Well, because I'm, you know, because let's say I want to, I'm like, okay, I listened to Gee and Conrad. I'm going to like buy some of these directory lists and see if they work. And this platform, this ad platform is selling me on, it's got tracking numbers. Everything's fine. It's got tracking numbers, great. The problem is if you let your directory where your vendor tell you how often your phone is ringing, let me use a very simple example with the directory. They will try and take credit for every single time that phone rings. And if someone calls you seven times, they will report that as seven leads. If you have it forward to call rail, call rail will figure out that it's the same person calling you seven times and will only show up as one lead. And you have the call recording in call rail, you can actually see what is going on. And then you can take your call rail data, even the recordings and automatically throw it into your take management system. If you're using a sophisticated take management system, that's why you need to do it instead of just letting some graph from some monthly report show up and tell you that everything is going hunky-dory and that $6,000 you're dropping that year is a really good investment. So relying on your vendor to report on how they are doing, especially if things like phone calls and farm fills, it is a futile, silly effort. I'm going to throw another thing at you here. What about nap consistency? Well, a lot was made about nap consistency going way back. So the nap consistency, most of the directories, and I can like this goes back to my days at Avo when we were really big on tracking phone numbers, most of the directories will enable and you can do this with code, enable you to identify your primary phone number and you can also use a displayed tracking number, which is totally fine. It is not a nap. Totally fine. It's a problem. That's right. And the directories as citations, this is important. The nap game has changed dramatically, but having these citations correct is actually important. I'll also add as a side note tangent that you do the same thing with Google Business Profile, right? So the displayed number in your Google Business Profile should be a call-rail number that you track and it is unique to Google Business Profile. Otherwise, you have no idea what GPP is actually doing for you. You also need to have your primary phone number on that GPP listing, and that's not going to scramble anything. And I think most of these majors are doing it, but if you're looking at this kind of stuff and you're like, "I got tracking numbers," but you're not doing that and it's on a major directory, that's one of these places that Google actually looks for data that can be a problem. To your point, I think that the nap value is probably not as strong as it used to be because it used to be like the primary thing, but anyway, you still got to track it also. We talked phone tracking. You got to track it all the way back to your CRM, so you actually know that this turned into a case for you. And again, to Conrad's point, you should be doing this independently of all the tracking stuff because we've seen the reports, you're going to get this report. It's like, "Well, look at all these impressions. You got all these ad impressions, and you got all these profile views, and you got all this stuff." And that's all nonsense until you get an open case in your CRM that you can source back to this directory, right, and for this context, you got to have three of them. Just because we're talking about tracking, I don't want to overlook this. I would also be using UTM codes to make sure that you know that the actual website traffic to your site is happening. If you've run that for a year and you've got a whole big zero, you're probably pretty certain that the phone is not ringing either. So I wouldn't discount the UTM codes tracking directory traffic into your site. Totally. And one more thing because we just were like, "Oh yeah, he's like, 'Do it,' and he's worth it." And blah, blah, blah. Go check to see if the directories are even ranking for your target queries. It's totally varies by practice area and location. I mean, if you're in the middle of nowhere, I was doing a San Bernardino Criminal Defense Layer search, guess what? Find Laws directory page for that was the number one thing in Google. That's not true if you go to downtown Chicago and New York. So when this goes back to our 2022 conversation, the directories visibility and search for your target queries and what does your presence look like on the directory page? Because even if that directory's getting that visibility, if you're buried on the page or all the competitors listed on the page have way more reviews than you, you get the same problem that we talk about in other contexts, like it's never going to convert for you. And the directories play a bunch of horse shit games to try and convince you when they're selling you that you are special. And in many cases, they'll do things like they'll rotate, right? And so they'll sell 20 people the top spot. You just rotate your one of your one of 20. You get 5% of it. I would be really careful about whether or not when you get these directory listings, if you expect to get value beyond the SEO link, which if you're paying for, it goes against Google's guidelines, but that's kind of beside the point at this point in time. If you're expecting to get value beyond that link, I would want to. You won't. How many of you are off the top of your head? How many clients you got that you're like, I know that we are four to five X multiple on fees, specifically from, let's take your best friend, Avo. My best friend, Avo, speaking of wow, I'll have it. I'll play defense on this back in the day. The answer is absolutely there were people absolutely building their business on Avo. Yeah. If you're talking back in the day, you mean pre-sale. I mean pre-sale and probably much earlier than that. I mean, Avo generated a ton of business for law firms. It's interesting we talked about Internet brands in Avo. Did Avo, did the value of Avo's advertising become more or less valuable to lawyers pre or post the acquisition? I would say it has faded somewhat into obscurity. I know you track search results more than I do, it really has. Yeah, they were gone until Google brought forums and discussions back. They were basically had disappeared. Which is why Mark Whitehead says, "Oh, Mark Whitehead, we have to come back to the Mark Whitehead quote. Mark wrote on somewhere on the socials when we were talking about this final purchase. Internet brands is where companies go to die." Which is kind of brutal. I've heard it before. It's not the first part of it. I've heard it before too. Yeah, I don't think Mark coined that. Mark was probably quoting you. You know, Avo did kind of fade off to obscurity. I think one of the, if you look at the Internet brands playbook, and I'll use Avo as an example because I was so close. By the way, thank you, Internet brands for the big check. I shouldn't ignore that fact that it worked out really fine for Conrad. I bet it works great for Internet brands too. Well, so this is where I'm going. I think they actually do a good job of the cash cowing, the brands that they purchase. Totally. Totally. They know exactly what they're doing. So I naively, very naively, thought that when Internet brands purchased Avo, they were going to put Mark Britton in charge of the legal kind of k-ratsu of portfolio companies that they had and he would drive innovation and they did the exact opposite. I can't remember the last innovative thing that Avo did other than selling to Internet brands. Well, the most innovative thing they did was buying engage and then selling the lawyer's leads to other law firms. Wow. Okay. That's incredible. That's innovative, right? If you're an MBA, sure. It's not tech-innovative. You're going to have some hate mail, dude. You're the one who broke that story. I did break that. And I only broke that story because I had two fucking clients who were so pissed off that it was happening to them and they had no idea why. They asked us what we were doing to make this happen. They thought it was us. They were pissed. Anyway, that's an aside. If you look at the Avo model and then you consider the Finelow model, my expectation is that they will cash cow this. There's probably not going to be a lot of innovation that is coming, that is investment that is made into the Finelow brand. The other thing that I think will probably happen is they've, you alluded, this is not alluded. You called this out at the beginning. There's a lot more data, right? So they will now have access to a lot more data and there will be cross data usage and value between Engage, Captora, Chloris.com, Martindale, NOLO, Avo, etc. And then it will include Finelow. And the value of that data, again, I lust after access to that data. There are over 4,000 solo practitioners who use Finelow. Are they better off or worse off? I don't know. Yeah. I'm pretty super curious to see in the context of, because again, we've really focused on the directory aspect of this. Do they continue their website building? Do they continue media management and other context? Because again, that seems to be a place where that data becomes extremely valuable. The directory stuff, they're primarily at the whim of Google, right? It's like, does Google continue to show directories prominently in these search results? Or does Google decide to show its own directory in the local pack more prominently in local services ads? You know, I don't know that. But I think the thing that we can say is, how many legal services consumers, when they start their legal services hiring journey, are thinking, I'm going to go to findlaw.com, or I'm going to go to avo.com, or I'm going to go to maybe lawyers.com, because it's literally lawyers.com. And I think the answer to that is very few. That's what we should do, is like, person on the street, ask them if they ever heard of Avo. Yeah. And Avo spent a lot of money trying to change that equation. I love their commercials, by the way. I love their TV commercials. Yes. And ask anyone who doesn't work in legal to tell you about one of those commercials today, and you will get the blanks there. Yeah, it's the Google game. So interesting, very, very interesting. We had two acquisitions in less than two weeks. As far as you know, Guy and I knew nothing about either of them, and we don't know anything about anything else on the horizon either. Perhaps next pod, we won't have to talk about another acquisition. We'll have to, we'll have something else to talk about. I foresee a few more coming. Come on. I just tried to tease it. Now you're, see, you accused me of having the mole. You're the US. I was talking about your mole. I think it's, you're, you're talking about your mole. Are we having mole envy now? So thank you again, dear listener, we're sorry that we belabored you with another acquisition talk. We hope you found something valuable in terms of assessing your investments in these directories and tracking it back to clients. As always, if you just landed here, please do subscribe for more lunch hour legal marketing. Until next time, Conrad and Guy is saying farewell. Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you'd like more information about what you heard today, please visit legaltucknetwork.com. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts and RSS. Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. The stars at night aren't the only things that are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas. With more than 100,000 actively practicing attorneys in the Lone Star State, we've got a whole bar of stars who know the ins and outs of Texas law. 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