Episode Description
Unlock the mystery of SEO without drowning in technicalities. In this episode, SEO expert Brandon Liebowitz breaks down why search engine optimization isn’t just a buzzword—it’s your secret weapon for getting clients without burning through your marketing budget. Having leveraged SEO to build my own practice from scratch, I can tell you it’s a game-changer for solo attorneys. Brandon shares practical strategies to boost your online visibility, including the content sweet spots Google loves, how to beat the competition with quality backlinks, and simple techniques to optimize your local presence. Whether you’re tech-savvy or tech-terrified, this conversation gives you actionable steps to climb search rankings and get in front of clients who are already looking for exactly what you offer. Listen now to stop wasting time on marketing that doesn’t work!
Episode Resources
Episode Transcript
BRANDON: [00:00:00] Really, the main goal of SEO is to help you get traffic without spending money on paid ads. They’ll save you money in the long term. People trust the organic much more than the ads.
LAUREN: Welcome to A Different Practice. I’m your host, Lauren Lester, and I’m passionate about helping solo attorneys build thriving practices.
After starting my own solo firm straight out of law school, I’m here to share the tools and strategies that made it possible. Think of this as grabbing coffee with your work bestie while learning everything they didn’t teach you about running a business in law school. Pull up a seat and get ready to build a different practice.
Welcome back everyone to a different practice today, we’re diving into a topic I am particularly passionate about, and it’s a blast from my past search engine optimization or SEO. Before I introduce my guest for today, I want to share just a little story with you. So, you know, most attorneys come to owning a law firm through a pretty traditional path.
They practice at a bigger firm, they build [00:01:00] up experience and clients, and then they branch out on their own. Well, my path was, let’s just say, a little bit different. Before I ever set foot in a law school classroom, I cut my teeth in the web development world. I was a project manager for a web based development company and then went on to work for one of my clients.
to manage their websites. I worked hand in hand with my developers and understanding and implementing SEO strategies was just a part of the process. We wanted these websites to rank well so that we could get in front of their target clients. It wasn’t just something I did. It was a language that I spoke pretty fluently.
So when I finally made the leap into the law and started my own firm, I didn’t have a massive marketing budget. Or Rolodex of referral sources. In fact, my marketing budget was zero and I opened my practice in a state where I didn’t go to law school or have any other professional connection to what I did have though, was an understanding of how people look for and find services online.
And let me [00:02:00] tell you, I leveraged the hell out of that knowledge. So I built my website from the ground up with SEO in mind. Each practice area got its own dedicated page. I used keywords everywhere, not just in my content, but in file names and in metadata. I wrote and included content that focused on actually answering the questions that potential clients were asking.
I knew that Google rewards websites that provide value, not just keyword stuffed sales pitches. So then came the real commitment. I had promised myself I would write one new blog post every single week for the first year. Was it easy? Absolutely not. There were countless Monday nights where I would be scrambling to finish a post before Tuesday morning, wondering why I hadn’t just sucked it up and bought a bunch of traditional ads like everyone else.
But here’s the thing. That commitment worked. That consistent content creation established my firm as an authority in my practice areas. While other new attorneys were networking themselves into exhaustion, hoping those efforts would turn [00:03:00] into referrals, I was getting calls from clients who had found me through Google searches, and they had already read my content.
They came in pre sold on working with me because they felt like they already knew and trusted me just from my website. As technology evolved, so did my strategy. When Google started emphasizing local results, I went all in on optimizing my Google business profile. I collected reviews religiously, responded to every question, and kept my information current.
That little map listing started driving as much business as the organic search results. So what does this all mean? Well, SEO is arguably even more important today than back when I started nearly a decade ago. Even with all the shiny new marketing tools out there, people still turn to their preferred search engine when they need help.
And the fundamentals haven’t changed. You have to create valuable content consistently, you have to establish your authority, and you have to make it easy for search engines to understand what you do, [00:04:00] where you do it. And the problem that you solve today. I’m thrilled to introduce to you. Brandon Liebowitz, an SEO expert who’s helped countless businesses, including law firms, climb the rankings and attract more clients.
Brandon’s run SEO optimizers since 2007. Which is a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium sized businesses get more online traffic. In today’s episode, Brandon breaks down the key components of an effective SEO strategy in 2025, talks about the common mistakes he sees law firms making, and he shares practical tips that you can implement today.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or just looking to improve your existing online presence, this episode is packed with actionable advice that can transform how your ideal clients find you online. So let’s jump in. Here is my conversation with Brandon Leibovitz. All right, Brandon, welcome to a different practice.
BRANDON: Thank you for having me on today.
LAUREN: So we’re talking about something that has been around for [00:05:00] quite some time now, but it is ever changing and it is not something I’ve actually dove into recently. So I am interested to hear your perspective and your expertise around SEO, but I want to start really basic for any of our listeners who maybe have heard the term, but aren’t quite sure.
What are we talking about? I know this is important, but I maybe don’t totally get it, so can you walk us back to sort of 101, when we’re talking about SEO, in simple terms, what is it, and why is it something that law firm owners should be paying attention to, because it’s important for their practice?
BRANDON: SEO is search engine optimization, and that means ranking websites on the different search engines.
Which primarily is Google, but nowadays with AI and everything and it’s ranking on ChatGPT even on Yelp. If you’re a lawyer, it can rank you higher on Yelp, it can rank you higher on Google Maps, it can rank you higher anywhere where people search. Essentially YouTube, if you’re an e [00:06:00] commerce website, it can rank you higher on Amazon.
So it’s really wherever there’s a search functionality, there’s ways to optimize and try to get you to rank higher. So you’re not spending money on paid ads. It’s really the main goal of SEO is to help you get traffic without spending money on paid ads, which is the main benefit of it is it will save you money in the longterm and it’s people trust the organic much more than the ads.
People see that you’re ranked. Organically, it’s like Google says, we trust you because Google just doesn’t rank anybody. And if Google trusts you, that lets people know that they should probably also trust you. And that gets you to get more leads and more conversions.
LAUREN: So yeah, this is when somebody types in, you know, family lawyer, Austin.
What is going to come up on whatever their search engine of choice is. And so we obviously as business owners would like to be one of those top results, cause that will be one way that we can get more clients in the door. And so what are some of the key components of an SEO strategy? that every law firm, maybe website should [00:07:00] have in place so that they can start to rank higher.
BRANDON: Yeah, I’ve worked with lots of law firms in the past and one important thing is breaking out all the different services that you offer into different pages. Not just saying that you’re a personal injury lawyer, but what type of personal injury do you deal with? And having all those as separate pages really helps out because the more pages you have, the more keywords you could target.
And if you don’t have a page about that service, it’s going to be Difficult to rank. So one thing that I’ve always done most of my clients already have those pages But I’ve had a few law firms that didn’t have those pages and we built that out And that got them to start showing up for new services and also same thing with like Cities, you could create different pages about cities that you want to service because you might be in a, in Los Angeles, for example, but you might want to hit the surrounding areas like Malibu and Santa Monica.
And if you don’t have pages about that, it makes it difficult to rank. So one thing that’s really important is just making sure your website’s fully optimized, has all the content, all the pages that we [00:08:00] Google better understand and know what your website’s about. It’s kind of like the foundational part of SEO without getting too technical in the weeds of like title tags and meta descriptions, but just content alone on all those pages is also very, very important.
Google struggles with images and videos on your website. They, they’re getting better at reading them, but they can’t really understand them other than like a file name, but they look at the text on your website and every page that you have that you want to rank needs to have a couple hundred words of text.
The more text you put on these pages, the easier it is for the search engines to, to decipher what that page is about. That’s really, really helpful without getting too technical because I’ve done that for lots of clients and they just automatically just started ranking because now Google sees they offer all these different services and they become more relevant to those keywords.
LAUREN: I think creating different pages for different services and putting some content on there that. the service makes a lot of sense. But in, even in that context, or particularly, you know, if you’re [00:09:00] looking at different locations, what is the type of content we should be putting on there? Like if we’re in LA and we want to do personal injury in LA and Malibu and Santa Monica.
I’m assuming we’re not just copying and pasting and just changing the word L. A. to Santa Monica and then to Malibu on three different pages. So when you get into those pages where it’s not as easy to differentiate the content because it’s not a different topic you’re talking about, how do we go about approaching what should be included on those pages?
BRANDON: That part can be a little tricky where you just got to think outside the box and think what can be useful for the reader. So if you’re doing personal injury, you might want to list out like hospitals in that area or you can list out different things that are somewhat related to it. So it’s just kind of think outside the box, which what would be helpful for the reader, like for real estate agents, I work with them all the time.
I’m like list out all the different, like the crimes, the schools, all that stuff. So if you’re dealing with personal injury [00:10:00] law, you can list out different things that could be useful for that. But situation, but it gets a little tricky. You can’t do it for everything. So you just have to really think for the reader, like what’s going to be beneficial to them.
And it has to be a hundred percent unique on each page. You can’t just, like you said, copy from one, like, can’t just have a template where you have the same text on every single page and you just change the city name that will. Get you in trouble. But as long as you change the content around on each page, that’s what Google wants.
But just don’t throw content up there to throw it up there. Just make sure it’s useful for the reader and it’s beneficial and it’s gonna actually help them.
LAUREN: And what are, you had mentioned keywords, how do we identify valuable ones for our business? And then how do we use those to either build out content or Put those words into the content.
Cause again, I’m assuming just, you know, typing personal injury a million times where it doesn’t actually sound like something somebody would say out loud is not going to be really helpful. But how do we identify like, well, I don’t know, do I just use a generic [00:11:00] term like personal injury? I don’t know if my clients use that.
How do we find out what the most valuable keywords are for us that we should be using?
BRANDON: You always want to start off. With keyword research, just for anything that you’re putting out there on the internet, whether it’s content, articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, whatever it is, you want to research those keywords using tools to figure out which keyword gets the most search volume, because when I work with like a personal injury lawyer, we’re going to try to figure out, do you want to rank for personal injury lawyer?
Personal Injury Lawyers, Personal Injury Attorney, Personal Injury Attorneys, or vice versa, like mixing it all up and each one gets different search volume. And usually when I did the research, in general, it seems like, well, for one example, that personal injury law firm in Los Angeles. When we did keyword research, Personal Injury Lawyers gets 20, 000 searches every single month.
Which is a lot of searches. But Personal Injury Lawyer, singular, gets 200, 000 searches every single month. Just by changing one letter. And if you’re just guessing, you might get it right. But you also might put the wrong one in there and you want [00:12:00] to take the time using tools like the Google Keyword Planner Which is a free tool from Google that will show you how many people search for that keyword every single month So you can put all those keywords in there and see which variation gets a most search volume And that would be the main focus keyword for that page.
So if you’re doing the personal injury lawyer page I have a page about personal injury law and that page would target the keyword personal injury lawyer And then sprinkled in throughout that content, you would hit in personal injury lawyers, personal injury attorney, personal injury attorneys, and you’re trying to hit all those variations in the content, but the main section, the main title of the page will be that main focus keyword that gets the most search volume.
LAUREN: Is that tool, like the Google Keyword Planner, which is great that it’s a free tool, is that one that they will give you ideas for keywords? Or is it something that we are the ones bringing the ideas and all of those different permutations of keywords to it to just sort of see how it, what the volume of searches is?
BRANDON: Either way, you could give it a list of keywords if you have a [00:13:00] big list of keywords that you want to target. Or you just put in one keyword in there, and it’ll give you hundreds, sometimes thousands variations. You can also put your website URL in there, and it’ll tell you what Google thinks your website’s about, which is also good to check to see, Hey, I made this page.
Tell me what keywords you think this page is about. And if they’re all completely off topic, then you got to go in and edit that content. But the Keyword Planner. It’s a great free tool, there are paid tools that will help you too, if you want to pay for a tool like Ahrefs, or Moz, or SEMrush, or the more popular ones, but there’s so many tools out there, but the Keyword Planner is from Google, and it’s free, and we’re trying to rank on Google, so that’s a great tool to take advantage of, but if you work for a company that wants to buy a tool, those paid tools are great, they just make it easier to read all that.
So they just make it more presentable.
LAUREN: Got it. No, that makes sense. They, you sort of are paying for the synthesis of the information, which can be really helpful, right? If we’re short on time, but the trade off there is if you want a free version, then putting in a little bit more of that research time on your [00:14:00] own can be really helpful.
What are some of the common mistakes that you see law firms in particular making when it comes to SEO? I mean, we talked about like not copying and pasting, not using templates. So I’m assuming that that’s one, but what are some other ones that you see are really common and how can we avoid, or if we’re doing them, correct those issues?
BRANDON: One of the most important things for SEO is pasting. Backlinks, getting other websites to talk about you
LAUREN: and what’s a backlink. A
BRANDON: backlink is a clickable link from another website that points to yours. So if you’re reading article on entrepreneur. com and in there it says Brandon Lebowitz and you click on it and it goes to my website, I’d be getting a backlink from entrepreneur.
com and the more websites, the more third party websites. That have clickable links that point to your website, the more trust Google is going to give to you and the higher they’re going to rank you. That’s pretty much how Google’s whole algorithm started is they said, we’re not just going to look at keywords because anybody could build a [00:15:00] website, especially nowadays, it’s pretty easy.
And they could say, I’m a personal injury lawyer in Los Angeles. And Google’s like, really, are you a lawyer in Los Angeles? Because we don’t want to send people to your law office and find out you don’t exist. The bad user experience and imagine you’re searching on Google and you say personal law firm and you click directions and you go to that office and it doesn’t exist.
You’re like, Google, what’s going on? And if Google does that enough, you’re probably like, I’m not going to use Google anymore. I’m going to use Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo or some other search engine out there. Google doesn’t want that to happen. So they want you to prove to Google that you really are who you say you are.
And if you’re a law firm. Or a lawyer, then you need to get other websites that are related to what you’re doing. So the more related the websites are that link out to you, the better off they’re going to be. And I see lots of times where people come to me or law firms come to me with no backlinks, which means there’s no trust, or they went on a site like Fiverr and bought a package of a thousand backlinks.
Thinking that it would rank, which [00:16:00] it would back in 2007. But in 2011, Google changed their algorithm and said it’s all about the quality, not the quantity of the backlinks. And that’s a big thing that’s been ongoing is you have to build good quality backlinks. And what is a quality backlink to Google? It means it’s from a site that’s related to what you’re doing.
And it has some authority. Those are the two really important things. If I gave you a backlink from my SEO company, that might look a little strange. Like why is this SEO company linking out to law firm? But if you got like a courtroom or judge or does, or other lawyers in other States where you’re not direct competitors, but it’s all about trying to think outside the box and how can I get other people to link out to me, which is not easy to do, but.
I see too many times where people have too many low quality backlinks or not enough good quality backlinks and without backlinks, those keywords on your website are not enough to move the needle to get you to rank.
LAUREN: Yeah, I can see that definitely being a challenge as you were talking. I was thinking like, how, how would you go do that?
Do I just. Email [00:17:00] entrepreneur. com and say, Hey, I have an article for you. I’m sure, you know, they get that all the time because they’re a legitimate source that people would love to have a backlink from. But if you’re, you know, in the legal space, you know, the courts are certainly not, at least in Colorado, where I am, aren’t going to link up.
A thousand attorney websites from their site because they don’t want to seem like they’re pushing a particular law firm. They want to stay impartial. So it can be probably pretty challenging in the legal profession to get those backlinks, but, you know, maybe certainly writing for certain publications, like you said, connecting with other attorneys who you can sort of have referral pages on your website if you’re not direct competitors, but yeah, being really creative about that and thinking about those opportunities to get those.
backlinks back to your website.
BRANDON: Yep. There’s even directories for law firms like Justy is a pretty one that pretty big one that I used to work with, fine law and other stuff like that. So there are niche related directories, but there’s not [00:18:00] too many and almost every single lawyer is going to be in there.
So you have to get on other websites that not everyone else is in because if you’re just in the same ones that everyone else is in, it’s going to be beneficial, but everyone else is getting that benefit as well. So you need to find unique websites like you could join local. Like your chamber of commerce in your city, that’s the way to get a backlink and using tools.
We could also look at your competitors. And that’s usually how I start building backlinks is let’s go to Google, search for your keywords, see who’s on page one, take all those websites and put them in different tools to look at their backlinks. Because if someone is on page one, it’s more than likely those backlinks that got them there.
And if we could replicate that and build similar ones. That should get Google to trust you in a similar way. The more popular tools would be the same as I mentioned earlier that Ahrefs or Moz or Semrush. They’re kind of like a all in one tool where they’ll have like 10 tools built in one. So you just got to pick one of those tools and they’ll help you out with like looking at backlinks.
Tracking keyword positions, looking at keyword research, and doing site audits, and doing [00:19:00] so many other things that will help you in your SEO journey.
LAUREN: Are there any other mistakes other than not having quality backlinks that you see that are, that can be really damaging to your results?
BRANDON: There are lots of mistakes that people make, like trying to hide keywords in the content, so like, Putting in font size 0.
001 and then if their website is a white background, they’ll use white font and squeeze all their keywords in and stuff like that, where it’s like you’re trying to hide stuff. Google has been around for 30 something years and they’ve seen all the tricks. And if you’re trying to game the system, it might work in the short run, but in the long run, it’s going to catch up with you and Google is happy to penalize website because once you’ve been penalized, instead of ranking higher, you drop down.
And what happens when you drop down in rankings, you’re. Probably gonna spend money on paid ads, which is how Google makes most of their money. But, just, as long as you’re not doing anything that seems a little weird or sketchy, or you’re trying to, like, to cheat the system, or you’re paying 5 on Fiverr to get a thousand backlinks, unfortunately, [00:20:00] those are short lived and can do more harm than good.
But, another thing that’s really important is Since your local business is getting you up on Google business profile, Google maps to try to capture that local presence and even Yelp or any of these platforms like just here, there’s ways to optimize your listing to rank higher on all of these platforms.
So having a presence on Google maps is great, but we need to really optimize it. And just like you build backlinks for your website, you got to build backlinks for Google business profile because Google business profile says, all right, you create a listing on our maps, but. How do we know that you really exist here?
And if you’re a local business, you should also be on like Apple Maps or Bing Maps and yellowpages. com and MapQuest and all these other third party sites. The more third party sites that have your name, address, and phone number listed, the higher you’re going to rank on Google business profile and start capturing that local.
LAUREN: I’ve heard that Google has made, or Google in particular, has made [00:21:00] a big push towards those localized results recently. Has that been your experience as well, that they really are trying to serve up, to your point, they’re, they’re trying to be helpful as much as we may hate Google and they’ve gotten so used to it.
super big and they make a ton of money. I mean, they are a business, but at the end of the day, they’re not going to be a business if they’re not helpful to the folks who are using their search engine. So are they, are they pushing folks and sort of seeing a push from the users that they want more localized results?
Like if I’m looking for an attorney, I don’t want someone who’s across the state for me or some big, huge national firm who may have an office. It’s somewhat near me, but they’re not really local. I’d like someone close. And so Google is prioritizing those quote unquote local results. Is that, I guess, is what I heard true and is that what we should be focusing on?
BRANDON: Google knows your geolocation. I mean, they know. Too much about you. So they know where you’re searching, what [00:22:00] browser you’re on, what your history, if it’s on mobile versus desktop, all this stuff. And they know if you’re in Los Angeles versus Seattle versus Austin or wherever you’re at, they’re going to geo or localize those results to your geolocation.
But then if you’re in Los Angeles, it’s huge. There’s lots of cities in Los Angeles. So you’re in pretty much like a five or 10 mile radius of where you’re located for Google maps, Google business profile. If you want to try it, rank. Expand that reach. It’s gonna be tough because Google says, Hey, there’s other lawyers in this area and we’d rather rank them because they’re more localized.
But if there’s no competition, like if you’re the only lawyer in like a 50 mile radius, then you’ll be able to hit a bigger reach. But if you’re in Los Angeles or any big city where it’s just hyper competitive, you get like 5, 10, like 15 miles. It’s like kind of pushing it where you’d rank for Google business profile.
But. That’s why I was mentioning earlier, if you want to show for other cities, you create pages on your website. So you wouldn’t be able to rank your maps further than that, [00:23:00] but you can create pages on your website. Like I have pages on my website that say I’m in Los Angeles and I do SEO in Los Angeles, but I could also help people in New York.
So I have a page about New York SEO and I have a page about Chicago SEO and all these other pages to help me start ranking for those different locations.
LAUREN: Well, that makes a lot of sense. And to our all of our rural friends who may have just thought, Oh, shoot, like five miles for me doesn’t get me very far.
Like you just said, it actually may be a benefit. We have a lot of folks in Colorado in particular. And I know just across the country, where we have these sort of deserts where there’s just not a lot of attorneys. But if somebody does put in, it sounds like, a little bit of effort in those more rural parts of the state for somebody who might be searching for their services, they may actually maybe find it easier to get ranked higher because there’s not as much competition.
The market isn’t as saturated there, which is a good tip to know. So do not fret, our rural friends we still got you and it’ll still work for you. So Brayden, as you can [00:24:00] probably imagine. We’re always busy. I feel like attorneys, we use that word so much, but we’re busy folks, especially those of us who own our own business and our running businesses.
So there’s a lot that we can do with SEO. It’s a pretty deep space. Obviously there are experts out there like you that we could use your services for, but if somebody just wanted to get started, maybe budgets were pretty tight and they wanted to take some initial steps on their own to get themselves going, what would you say are like the top three things?
That they should do, or at least make sure that their website or their online presence has.
BRANDON: I would say it’s probably some of the stuff that we mentioned, like content on every single page. You have to add text. If you don’t have text on every single page, it’s going to be tough to rank. So making sure that you just add more content, which I know a lot of people don’t want to put content on their website because it’s going to make it ugly for people, but I would just throw it at the very bottom of your page.
Because most people don’t really scroll down on a website, but Google will read from top to bottom, just don’t hide it. Like we were talking about earlier, [00:25:00] but at the very bottom, most people will not read it. So, but you need to put text on every single page that alone would probably get everyone more traffic just because Google’s now better, better able to read that page and that doesn’t require any coding backlink.
So our. Invaluable because if you don’t have these backlinks, so Google’s not going to look at that. So you have to be building backlinks and the more competitive the area that you’re in, the more backlinks you have to build. So if you’re in some small rural area, you could probably get away with building like 50 backlinks.
But if you’re in Los Angeles for personal injury law firm, you’re gonna have to build hundreds, sometimes thousands, because it’s just hyper competitive. And the more competition, the more backlinks you have to build, essentially. It’s not really a one size fits all, and you could see how many backlinks you have or your competitors have using those tools that I mentioned, like Ahrefs and Moz and SEMrush.
And the other one that’s really important is just getting that local presence, making sure that you’re on as many different maps as possible, but not just listed there, but fill in [00:26:00] as much information as possible. If it says write 500 words, write 500 words. Especially on Yelp and Google Business Profile, don’t write 200 words because text is invaluable.
Just like Google needs text, Yelp needs text, Justia, all these platforms need text. And the more you’re able to fill out, the more likely they are going to show you for different services and different geolocations.
LAUREN: So content, content is king. That’s even when I did this, God, almost 20 years ago at this point, that was the mantra.
So I’m glad to hear that still around backlinks and then a local presence and local directories. Quick follow up for you there. When we’re talking about content, certainly flushing out the content on your pages that exist now, but what about, or is it a good way to add content using blogs still? Does Google still a like?
That it’s more content and B, that it’s content that is going to be updated. That if you post a blog every week, there’s new content on your site [00:27:00] that Google can use to say, Oh, this is what this site is about. And this is the services this person provides.
BRANDON: Yeah, no blogging is great and blogging became popular because after we built all the service pages out, if you want to rank for new keywords, like how do you do that?
So back to that personal injury lawyer example, you build a page about personal injury law, like burn injury law and all these different pages. But if you want to rank for other keywords, you got great blogs. So if someone’s wondering, like, when do I qualify for burn injury or qualifies for burn injury lawsuit, you can write a blog post about that and someone searching for that.
That blog post will rank that leads them into your website and then from there, hopefully they want to learn more about your services. But in those blogs, clickable links that point to other services and also blogs because once someone gets to the end of a page. Or blog posts, they might just hit that back button, but if you have clickable links that point to other pages that keeps them on your website longer, like if you’re reading anything on most [00:28:00] websites nowadays, our news websites, you’ll see all these clickable links everywhere because they want, they know once you get to the end, you’re probably gonna hit that back button.
You’re probably not gonna leave a comment. You’re just gonna hit that back button. They don’t want that to happen. They want you to stay on that website as long as possible. And same thing. Just keep people engaged. You don’t have to post every week. You could do once a month. That’s a good starting point.
The more the better, but once a week can be a little overwhelming for business owners because you have so much on your plate and then do you really want to write another article or blog post? And it’s just time consuming. But if you write one really good one every single month, that is great. Google sees that and that keeps Google coming to your website.
Google also sees that you update your website because if you don’t update your website, Google might think you go out. You’re out of business. So if your website hasn’t been updated in four or five years, you should probably update your website, especially the footer where it probably says the date, and it might say like 2022.
And I get that all the time. And Google reads all these little things. And if they see that, they might think that you’re out of business and we don’t want that to happen. [00:29:00]
LAUREN: Those are such great, really practical tips and pretty easy things that folks can start to implement. Like you said, if blogging once a week is too much, once a month is still great.
I think all of us can probably carve out a little bit of time to do that. And always remember, and I try and remind myself too, that Folks are searching for answers when they go to a search like Google or they’re going to Yelp. They’re looking for something and so that’s always a really great, at least in my experience has been, to write a blog post, like you said, about answering those questions.
So how do I know if I qualify for X or what do I do if this is happening in my case? And for all of my attorney listeners, right, it’s, you can put all the disclaimers that it’s not legal advice and it’s just information which it absolutely should be. But the point is that you’re getting that content on the page and these search engines are indexing it to go, Oh, you know, Lauren’s talking a lot about prenups and the benefits of them.
And I’m going to start to show her contents to folks who are searching for. [00:30:00] How do I protect my assets if I’m getting married or how do I avoid paying spousal support? Whatever those questions are. So that’s really helpful and I think that’s all something that we can do. If we start doing these tips and we start implementing these practices, what would you say is a typical timeline that we should expect to start to see some results?
Like I know that it is Unrealistic to say, great, I’m going to post a blog post this week and I’m going to get a couple backlinks and all of a sudden I’m going to shoot to the number one ranking, right, for my very saturated keyword that maybe I’m looking at. So that’s unrealistic. But if somebody does stay consistent and puts these practices into place, what have you seen as kind of the typical time where you should start to see at least some upward momentum?
BRANDON: That one varies on the competition of those keywords and how much SEO you’ve done to your website versus your competition. If you’re a brand new website in Los Angeles trying to rank, it’s probably going to take [00:31:00] six months, maybe a year just because it’s hyper competitive. But if you’re in a smaller town in Colorado where there’s only a few other law firms, then you’d probably move up much, much faster.
But the older your website is and the more backlinks you have, the faster you’ll rank. So I have clients that I have like 15 year old websites have a ton of backlinks. It’s just they didn’t have the website easy to read for Google. So Google couldn’t read the website. They struggled and they weren’t able to rank them.
And by going in and cleaning up the website, adding all those new pages, they just shot up within like a month and a half to like the first page of Google for all their keywords, which is a rarity, but it does happen. So it just depends on your website age. But it’s a brand new one. In general, it does take about six months on average because Google just doesn’t trust anybody.
I mean, you can’t just speed that trust up. I mean, there are ways to do it. If you do those, they’ll probably hurt you in the long run by like buying low quality backlinks and things like that, which we don’t want to jeopardize your reputation or your website.
LAUREN: Yeah. It’s like that old [00:32:00] adage about planting a tree, right?
Like the best time to plant, it was 10 years ago. And the second best time is today. So there is a level of, it just takes time and you can do all of these things. And I think that those are all great and we should all be doing them. But at the same time, it’s just going to take some time. So if you’re a brand new business.
It’s not going to happen tomorrow. I think, you know, six months, even to a year, you know, that’s a pretty realistic timeline. And we just need to sort of trust the process. I know that we’ll eventually get there if we put these practices into place. When we look at measuring, sort of watching the metrics and knowing like, oh, okay, it’s been six months.
Oh, I’m starting to see some progress here. What should we be looking at to to pinpoint that, like, what are the metrics that are really helpful? I assume because Google knows, like you said, way too much about us. If I just search for my own keyword because I’ve been working on my own site and I live in the, in the city that I practice in, that’s not maybe [00:33:00] going to be as accurate as a result as if, you know, Joe down the street who’s never done this does it.
So what, how, how do we track those metrics and what should we be looking at?
BRANDON: We definitely want to, if you are searching for your keywords, make sure you log out of Google because if you are logged in, you’re gonna be like, I’m number one for all my keywords. Yeah, but that’s because Google personalizes the results and to get the true results, you got to log out.
That’s log out, go incognito, and then you can search from your home and you’ll get the real results. Tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console are really, really helpful free tools that will show you where your traffic’s coming from, what pages they visit, how long they stay on your website.
It tells you, it’s like data overload, it’s like too much information, but data is invaluable and Google Analytics is just. All your traffic, so it’ll show you all your website traffic from SEO, from social media, from paid ads, from any way that you’re getting traffic, Google Analytics will track that.
Google Search Console is [00:34:00] primarily for SEO, where it will show you your, your SEO performance. It’ll show you what keywords you rank for, which is pretty nice, and it’ll show you if you’ve been penalized, which hopefully no one has been penalized. It’ll show you. A ton of information, how fast your website loads, if it looks good on mobile, if it doesn’t look good on mobile, I’ll tell you why.
Like I’ve had clients where their website was mobile friendly, but according to Google, it wasn’t because of the colors and they weren’t being shown on mobile devices. And mobile brings in over half the traffic nowadays. And if you’re not showing up on mobile, you’re missing out. So you might have a mobile friendly website, but search console will show you if Google really is.
I
LAUREN: think that’s a great place to start. I think all of us may be, you know, a thing to do in the next couple of weeks should be to go on to Google search console and just see where, where are we doing great naturally? And where can we make some improvements? Cause that information is invaluable. Like you said, if you think your website’s mobile friendly, which a [00:35:00] lot of developers now develop the sort of mobile first, right.
And they’ll tell you that. But if. Google is saying, yeah, we, we know you think that, but we don’t think that on our end, that’s really invaluable information to know, to then know where to start, to start to make those improvements. So that’s so fantastic that they give you all of that information basically for free, and like you said, you can certainly pay for some more advanced tools and tools that will synthesize the information.
But just starting with free tools with Google is a good place to start. I know I’ve gotten a lot of items that I need to go back and check off my list. But if anyone is looking for some help or to learn more about what you do or learn more from you, where is a good place for folks to connect with you?
BRANDON: So I actually created a special gift for everybody. Go to my website at SEO optimizers. com forward slash gift. That’s S E O O P T. I M I Z E R S dot com forward slash gift and they can find that [00:36:00] gift there along with my contact information and classes. I’ve done over the years. I’ve thrown up for free so you can see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about.
And also, if you do have a website and want a free website analysis, I’m happy to check out your website from an SEO point of view. And they book some time, they can book some time on my calendar for free there as well.
LAUREN: Awesome. What such great resources. Thanks so much, Brandon. This was so helpful and really enlightening and really practical.
So I really appreciate your time and your expertise today.
BRANDON: Thank you for having me on today.
LAUREN: Thanks for joining me on another episode of A Different Practice. If you found value in today’s conversation, Subscribe to my solo success lab newsletter, where each week I test and share what actually works in solo practice, sign up for free at a different practice.
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