Chapter 14 · Questions & Answers
The Power of Search Engine Optimization
An advanced SEO strategy employed by a savvy lawyer can help you outperform your competitors, even lawyers with really deep pockets.— Jason Hennessey
Jason Hennessey, the CEO of Hennessey Digital, will be the first to admit that being an SEO expert isn’t the most in-demand job title in the legal market. “Nobody in the fifth grade tells their parents, ‘Hey, Mom and Dad, when I grow up, I really want to be an SEO specialist,’” he says. But perhaps more people should, as an SEO-optimized website is one of the most valuable tools that mass tort lawyers can possess.
People’s career paths lead them to SEO in unique ways. In Jason Hennessey’s case, that turn began when he was nineteen years old. After serving in the Air Force, he launched a wedding-themed DJ business while attending UNLV in Las Vegas. While his ultimate goal was to attend law school, he decided to take out ads in the yellow pages, push for coverage in Las Vegas bridal magazines, and work part-time at a radio station to bolster his DJ business. In a short time, he gained name recognition in Las Vegas but still looked for ways to attract brides who were flying into Vegas for their weddings.
His solution? Build a website. He decided to pay a developer $5,000 to create a site called vegasweddingmall. com on the condition that the designer would also teach him as he went along. Three months after the website was completed, the site had registered only a handful of clicks.
When he called up the developer to diagnose the problem, Hennessey was told it wasn’t a designer’s job to worry about clicks. He was told that web designers “design” sites. Others worry about traffic. If Hennessey wanted to gain greater traffic, he was going to have to find someone who specialized in SEO (search engine optimization).
Knowing absolutely no one in the field, Hennessey bought a 350-page book online from an SEO wizard named Aaron Wall, a book he’s kept to this day. Although SEO techniques have evolved a great deal since then, Hennessey was able to elevate his website to the number one position on Google when people searched for phrases like “Las Vegas wedding” and “Las Vegas wedding DJ.”
Soon large casinos on the strip were calling Hennessey, asking to advertise on his sites. Then came limo companies, photographers, and other wedding service providers. The outreach was so tremendous he built a whole separate business out of it, which became a series of virtual wedding malls. Soon he’d built a Seattle wedding mall, a Los Angeles wedding mall, and so on, which would eventually land in the top three for Google searches that included the word “wedding.”
In that moment, he says, Hennessey realized that SEO was going to change the way that people looked at marketing forever. He eventually sold off his business and moved to Georgia with his family. But by chance, he was asked by an area DUI lawyer in Atlanta to give a presentation to some of his trusted advisors and an impressive group of DUI lawyers from all over the country.
There were more than fifty lawyers there, from every state in the union, so Hennessey decided to tell his story and explain, in broad strokes, how he was able to climb the ranks on Google. Afterwards, more than a dozen lawyers approached him for advice; one of whom said, “I can’t believe this. I’m paying my SEO guy $7,500 a month, and he’s not doing any of the things you just described.”
Hennessey soon found himself with more than a half dozen clients and about $40,000 in reoccurring revenue every month. Things snowballed from there, including a stop at a personal injury conference, which brought personal injury lawyers into the fold. Today, Hennessey’s agency, which works with a number of prominent lawyers and law firms, ranks 290 on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in the United States. —JAcoB MALHerBe
How do you define SEO and what do mass tort lawyers need to understand about the term? SEO stands for search engine optimization, but when you hire the wrong people, it stands for “same excuses over and over.” SEO is about finding a targeted audience at the precise time they’re looking for a service or product. People think Google rankings and SEO are black magic. In some sense, they used to be. But today, it’s different. Google just wants to send people with a very specific question to a site that addresses their search criteria.
What are some general misconceptions that lawyers have about building effective websites? Often lawyers hire people to develop a website without giving enough thought to an overall strategy. They’ll hire an agency to build one in addition to a couple of writers who are tasked with writing a few random blog posts. That’s not the right approach for SEO. You need a strategy. You need to analyze who you’re trying to attract and what kinds of cases will be most profitable—then you develop a content system that targets those specific goals. You need to do research in advance so you know what people are searching for. And then—and only then—do you build your content system.
Once you build your SEO-optimized website, can it be further fine-tuned to improve mass tort work? Yes. For example, we worked with a personal injury attorney who focused almost exclusively on high-volume car accidents. Over the years, our SEO work helped him become a dominant player in a very competitive market. But at one point, we asked if he might be interested in allowing us to leverage what had become a very authoritative website, so he could pursue mass tort cases.
He liked the idea, so we devised a strategy and built a content system that helped him generate more calls and mass tort clients, which he then referred out to other mass tort lawyers. Roughly two weeks after our changes, he called us and said, “That was brilliant. We just got a $500,000 case thanks to your efforts.” That’s what a good SEO strategy can do: It can bring a personal injury lawyer who doesn’t know much of anything about mass torts and help him find immediate success.
What are the key components of an “authoritative” website? Authoritative websites should include three main components. The first component is technical SEO (i.e., making sure you’re giving Google a clean, crawlable site that performs well with search engines and has a good internal link structure). It’s technical work. Lawyers are not technical SEO engineers, which is why we recommend lawyers hire someone who possesses these skills. You can create all the content in the world and build all the links you want, but if your site is not being indexed correctly by Google, it’s all going to be in vain. In my opinion, technical SEO makes up about 30 percent of a good SEO strategy; what’s more important is your content strategy.
Here’s why: As you publish more high-quality content on your website—meaning that content is relevant to the people and subject matter you’re targeting—Google begins to deem you an authority on a given subject. Think of it this way: The Google algorithm is building a giant word cloud in cyberspace. The goal is to understand the contents of that word cloud and become a part of it. Every time you publish an article about Roundup, for instance, Google puts greater emphasis on that word “Roundup,” which makes your website more relevant to discussions about Roundup.
The Google algorithm is building a giant word cloud in cyberspace. The goal is to understand the contents of that word cloud and become a part of it.
The other thing that makes you an authority is developing a targeted content schedule and publishing that content on a frequent basis. Google is indexing every single page of your site. Lawyers can track that number themselves. All they have to do is go to Google and type in the word “site,” then a colon (:), and then your URL with no spaces. (Don’t add the www.) This is called a “site command” search. Google will show you how many pages of content you’ve indexed. It’s one of the best ways to determine how you compare with other competitors in your space. If you only have fifty pages of content indexed and you type in your competitor’s address and they have five thousand pages of content indexed, you know what you’re up against.
Wikipedia is a perfect example. If you do a search for anything, you’re probably going to see Wikipedia rank in the top three in terms of results. And if you were to do a site command search for Wikipedia (site:wikipedia.org), you’d see hundreds of millions of pages indexed. They’re all linked together, and there’s a lot of content there. That’s why Wikipedia is one of the most authoritative websites on the World Wide Web.
The third element that makes a website authoritative is the popularity of the site. You gain popularity by encouraging other people to talk about you and link back to your website. There’s something called page rank that bleeds over from someone’s website to your website. And it’s all about the relevancy and the popularity of the site that’s linking back to you. So if I get a link from CNN’s homepage because it did a story about mass torts and it referenced me as an attorney and the story linked back to my site, that’s one of the strongest links possible because CNN has a domain rating of 93 out of a 100. However, if a friend of mine who opened up a local laundry business said, “Hey, you should go check out my friend’s personal injury site,” that’s going to have a lot less weight and relevance.
What can drive down a site’s ratings? There’s a term in the SEO space called “pogo sticking” that all lawyers should understand. Google measures how long people spend on the first site they visit before they go back to the Google search bar. If Google finds there’s a site or page that ranks number one but people are only staying there for six seconds and quickly going back to click on something else, that tells the Google algorithm that the page doesn’t satisfy the intent of the query. That’s why lawyers need to create pages that are “sticky” by offering deep content, short videos, and the like. In short, the amount of time people spend on a page affects your website’s ranking.
You also have to be on guard against bad links to your site. Sometimes lawyers take shortcuts and hire an SEO provider to build lots of links to the website, which wind up being spammy. If you have too many suspicious links coming to your website, you can get manually penalized or algorithmically filtered out by Google. You wake up the next day and you’re in what they call the “minus 50 penalty,” where all of a sudden you’re on page five of Google’s search results for that term—effectively invisible to most users.
How do you define quality content, and what are the components of that quality content? We use a term called the skyscraper technique. If you’re walking around New York City, looking up, your eyes are going to gravitate to the grand, imposing buildings, like the Empire State Building or the Freedom Tower. You need to apply that same approach to SEO content writing. If you’re smart, you look at the search query you’re trying to rank for—pick whatever mass tort case you’re working on— and study the top 10 results on Google.
Google likes those pages because they are satisfying the people who are searching for a topic online. You have to analyze those sites to see how they addressed the query. What questions are they answering, and what are they missing? The goal is to identify what they didn’t cover in full and fill in that gap by addressing it in more detail on your site. Maybe top sites addressed the query but didn’t go into detail about the history of this case. Maybe they listed two major side effects, but there are really five. So now you have to go interview a doctor on side effects to get additional information and post a video. If a top website offers three thousand words on a topic, it might be beneficial to post twelve thousand words on that same topic and go into much greater depth.
Are there advanced techniques to achieve these rankings? Let me reveal a little personal secret. Let’s say a lawyer wanted to rank for the term “Roundup cancer lawsuits.” What you want to do first is type “Roundup cancer lawsuit” into Google, and Google will display five questions.
If you click on the question list at the bottom of the page, the list will expand and show another three questions. Click again, and it will display another three questions. The smart approach would be to start answering those questions. Say one of the questions is “What caused the Roundup cancer lawsuit?” You take that question and address it in about three hundred words, but then you take that H2 tag, which is a subheading, and you make that question in the H2 tag a link that’s going to go to another page where there’s a more detailed two-thousand-word article that answers that question. Keep doing that. Write a question, summarize the answer, and then link to another page with more information. What you’re really doing is building a content hub, which will register with Google’s algorithm.
What are some of the link-building strategies that you recommend? First, I would get a paid subscription to ahrefs.com, then start watching their training videos on YouTube. They have some excellent content. Put your website into the tool and download all your referring domains. Then do the same thing with all your competitors. Then see how it is ranking on Google, on the first page, for some of the keywords that you’re targeting. Put them into the tool and download their referring domains.
Now grab a beer—or root beer for those who don’t drink—and look at all the patterns. Look for the links that your competitors have that you don’t and figure out a way to get the same link. Work from the highest domain rating to the lowest domain rating. If they have a link from the local Better Business Bureau, and you don’t, call your rep and pay the $500 annual fee for the link. If you want more link-building tips, subscribe to my free Legal Marketing Brain Trust Facebook Group at www.lmbtgroup.com.
Are there drawbacks to creating an in-house SEO team? There are lawyers out there who think they can hire an SEO person in-house. And that could work, but good luck trying to find one person at a salary of $70,000 to $100,000 per year who’s going to do everything. They’re going to need to be great at technical SEO, plus be a good writer, editor, and link-builder. It’s not possible to be the best at all those things. If a lawyer is serious about their website, they want an agency that goes out and recruits the best of the best for all those skill sets, as opposed to a local guy, who lives five miles from the office, who’s trying to do it all but is doing most of it ineffectively.
If a lawyer is already working with an SEO specialist, how do you gauge their effectiveness? First, ask yourself, “Is my phone ringing?” Then separate pay-per-click numbers because pay per click will always get results. If you shut your pay per click off for a month, would your phone still ring? That’s the real litmus test as to whether your SEO is working. Keep testing it. The first thing, once again, is to do a site command search, which I discussed previously. Look at how many pages of content are indexed. If you’re paying your SEO company $20,000 per month and there are only forty pages of content indexed, you’re getting taken advantage of because they’re not generating enough content. That number should grow every month. We have clients that started with two hundred pages of indexed content who now have 3,500 pages.
The second thing lawyers can do is run a tool called Copyscape and another tool called Siteliner. You basically put your URL in Copyscape, and it will tell you if your content is being plagiarized by another site or if you unknowingly have a site that has plagiarized someone else’s content. You don’t want an SEO provider who writes one article and then uses it for six different clients in six different markets. Say one of your practice areas is car accidents, and an SEO agency writes a page entitled “Do you need a Dallas car accident lawyer?” You want to make sure there’s not another one of their clients whose website has the exact same content with a different title, something like “Do you need a Phoenix car accident lawyer?” In that case, the people you are paying are actually harming your website. You can use Siteliner to see if you have pages that are being duplicated internally. If you have a Dallas car accident page and a Fort Worth car accident page with the exact same content, you’re never going to rank well for either of those terms because you have a duplicate content problem and Google sees it.
My third go-to tool, which is my favorite, is Semrush at semrushtool.com. If you type in your URL there and press “submit,” it will give you a couple of numbers. The first will show you how many keywords your website ranks for and where you rank for these keywords. So if you’re paying your SEO person $20,000 per month rate for 150 keywords and you’re still stuck at position 27 for “Los Angeles personal injury lawyer,” you’re not getting the best return on your money. The second number that Semrush gives you is the estimated monetary value of your website. It might say, for instance, that your site has a value of $2,600 per month. This is how much money you would have to spend on a pay-per-click campaign with Google Ads to get the same organic traffic that you’re getting now. It basically evaluates your SEO value based on a pay-per-click spend figure. So again, if you’re spending $20,000 per month and the value of your website is only $600 per month, your SEO team isn’t working.
The third thing this shows is a historical graph of how well your site is performing. Your graphs should constantly be going up—not going up and down like a roller coaster. They should be compounding every month as you write more content. If you’re going up and all of a sudden the chart plummets, that means your SEO provider is taking shortcuts and your site probably got hit with an algorithmic update or something.
Describe the process that you go through when you partner with a client or when a client comes to you . I find most of my clients by way of personal introductions. We never randomly email people out of the blue and say, “Hey, are you paying too much for SEO? Look at what we can do for you.” That’s not our way, in large part because those are the kinds of tactics that spammers often use. When we talk with clients, we usually start with a sixtyminute conversation. We do a Zoom call, so we can see each other, and I can share my screen with them. I tell them from the start, “Hey listen, this is not a sales call at all. We’re just talking, and I’m just here to educate you on what I’m seeing. Here’s what your competitors are doing. Here’s what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.”
Look for SEO people who want to educate first—who can point to a competitor’s site and show you how they might have gotten a valuable link and how you could get the links you need. We often show potential clients case studies for what we’ve done for other clients in different markets, as well as all the steps we’ve taken and where we started. We look at hard numbers. After three months, they increased to X. After five years of working with us, they’ve increased to Y. Ask for real data. One case study won’t do it; you need to see multiple case studies and ensure they all show the same kinds of results. That will help prove they have the experience needed to get the desired results. Some markets are a little bit more competitive and might take a little bit longer, but the strategy is 1,000 percent the same.
Look for SEO people who want to educate first—who can point to a competitor’s site and show you how they might have gotten a valuable link and how you could get the links you need.
In your opinion, how much money should be allocated to site building and technical aspects and how much should be allocated to content? When we write a proposal, there are a few different buckets we look at. There are consulting hours, which is used to develop the overarching strategy, devise the link-building strategy, and do the technical analysis. The second bucket is web development: that’s fixing the website, publishing articles, and using internal link-building strategies. The third line item, which is smaller, involves graphic design and finally conversion rate optimization. So we’re constantly split testing pages to improve conversions.
Most of your money should go toward content and link building. We have some clients spending $25,000 per month just on content and roughly the same on links. Those are constants. You never want to pull back on those budgets. If anything, you’re going to need to increase those budgets. So as it starts to work, you’re publishing a hundred thousand words of content, and then you’re publishing two hundred thousand words of content. And then link building too. It’s the same thing because even if you rank number one on Google, you have people with deep pockets that are hiring smart people to eclipse you. You maintain your position by keeping good, strong links and getting more innovative with even better links, which is why those budgets should never decrease. Th ey should remain constant.
What if you are a lawyer practicing in a small town rather than a big urban area? In a very small rural market, you’re looking at someone writing and publishing about fifteen thousand words of content per month. You’re probably starting out at about a $8,500-per-month SEO budget. Th at’s the minimum. People come to me and say, “Hey, this is great, but I’ve got a $5,000 budget; take it or leave it.” A lot of people would take it, but we don’t because they’re not going to get the results they’re hoping for. Truth is, it won’t work because they don’t have the budget to do it the right way. Say a lawyer is in a more competitive market—perhaps Tampa, Florida—that might be more of a $12,500 budget. If you have somebody that’s just getting started in Manhattan and they don’t have a website and have zero links, sometimes it’s just not feasible. How do you compete with people who’ve been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars or even a million per year in SEO? My advice: It might make more sense to do pay per click initially to build a pipeline of cases, then reinvest those profits into your long-term SEO strategy. We have clients in big markets who are now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month just on SEO, but they realize the value. Th ey understand its worth.
Are there any other key takeaways that lawyers should remember about SEO? Th ere are people who are savvy and people who are naïve. And then there are competitors who simply have deep pockets. It’s important to remember that large companies and large law firms have a lot of bureaucratic red tape to cut through. Th ey can’t just publish content and FAQs haphazardly. But a more nimble lawyer or law firm with a good site doesn’t have to worry about all those approvals and can start publishing content and answering questions and being more agile with their strategy. When it comes to SEO, content is king, but you need to develop the right strategy to deploy the right kind of content. We have clients that we write two hundred thousand words per month for. It’s very strategic. We know exactly what we’re going to be writing for the entire year, what that URL structure is going to look like: page titles, H1 tags, H2 tags, meta descriptions, and how the pages will link to each other. You need to build the whole architecture of the website in advance. What will the homepage look like? How is it going to be optimized? What’s going to link to a particular page? You have to start with the right strategy from the start.
An advanced SEO strategy employed by a savvy lawyer can help you outperform your competitors, even lawyers with really deep pockets. We, for example, have a lead generation website that’s in the car accident space in a very competitive market that actually performs better from a search engine perspective than a guy who’s probably spending $10 million a year on marketing. And that’s just the lead generation site that was developed to practice and test that SEO strategy. Th at’s a pure example of the power of SEO.
Hennessey Digital
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H1 Tag: Header tag. Think of it like the headline of a newspaper article. H1 tags are important because it’s one of the first things that Google looks at when it’s testing for relevancy (i.e., when it’s trying to figure out the content of a page). That’s why it’s important to add a keyword to the header tag. But you also have your H2 tags, you’ve got H3 tags, which are subheads and the like. Writing good SEO content is about making it easy for the reader but also optimizing for search engines. Google Search Console: In short, it’s the only way that Google can communicate with you as the owner of a website. Use it and Google will tell you all of the technical problems that are going on with your website; it’ll tell you the performance and speed of your website. Google will tell you how to fix all of that. It’ll tell you if a site received a manual penalty. But most importantly, a search console allows you to protect yourself from those bad spammy links that are coming into your website. Disavow File: A disavow file allows you to analyze all the links that are coming into your website and identify which are good and which are bad. You find those bad links—say something from a porn site, a gambling website, Viagra links—and basically tell Google that you want nothing to do with them. When you submit them, they’re called disavow files. Google introduced this service because there is something called negative SEO when competitors can go in and build spammy links to your site in order to get you penalized so they can move up in the rankings while you slide down.
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