How Law Firms Can Build a Converting Digital Presence (Full Transcript)

[00:00:08] Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're excited to have you in here at this webinar. It's going to be a very, very interesting and lots of good information for you guys. We're excited to share with you. And we'll get started here in just a few minutes. We'll get some time for more attendees to jump in. But feel free to put in the chat where you're from and your name. We'd love to know where you're located and where you're joining us around the country and maybe the world. We'll see. So yeah, we'll get started here in just a few minutes. Welcome, John. One of our great partners. Thanks for popping in, John. We've got some others coming in here. Just welcome, everybody. We're excited to have you on the webinar. We're going to get started soon as soon as we have some more a few more people give them a little bit more time. And as I mentioned, if you if you can, we'd love to know your name and where you're from. In the chat, make sure you have that set to everyone down there if you don't. But yeah, excited to to see where all of you are coming from. Follow John's lead, I guess. There you go. Houston. Nice. Hey, Aaron. Oh, Canada. Nice. Very cool.

[00:02:16] Speaker 2: We've got a Virginia based example, Emily. So stay tuned. We'll be featuring your market area in our presentation.

[00:02:27] Speaker 1: OK, see. That's great. All right, those of you joined us in the last minute or so, just we'll get started here in just a second. Welcome to the webinar. And as you can see in the chat, we would love to see who you are and where you're from. You know, it's been a pretty good spread here so far. Everyone is kind of all over, which is nice. But yeah, we'll get started here in probably about one more minute. And then we've got a lot of stuff to cover. So.

[00:03:13] Speaker 2: South Africa.

[00:03:15] Speaker 1: Oh, nice. So, Jess, we've gone global, international representing all of that. OK, let's let's get started with this. Welcome, everyone, to our webinar, Building a Digital Presence that Converts in 2025. We've got great hosts, great panelists for you today. And so before we get started, I just want to go through a few housekeeping items with webinars. I'm sure you're all pros at this by now. But yeah, so before we get started, we'd love to know if you have a first name, what city you're from, and then would love to just know throughout the conversation, even if you've already put in this information, what do you think is the one thing holding your your law firm's growth back right now? It's something that we we always love. All of this content is going to be ways to help you grow. So we would love to see kind of what you what your opinion is holding your law firm's growth back. And then also just want to make sure once again on the chat settings to make sure that we're getting everything. Please make sure that your two section does say everyone on the drop down box. And it's not just the hosts and panelists, because we want to open up conversation through this and have you guys be as interactive as can be. Additionally, you can either put your questions in the chat. We do have a q&a link as well in there. So either one, I'll be monitoring those trying to answer as best as we can or stopping the guys here to make sure we get those if we don't answer the question during the actual session, we do have a q&a built in booked in at the end of the presentation. So know that we will make sure to get to all of the questions as best as we can. And without further ado, we'll go through and just introduce everybody. So my name is Blake Roberts. I'm the Director of Business Development here at Lawmatics. I've been here about two years and been in the legal industry for almost 10. So excited to host you guys this webinar today. And pretty much after this, I'm going to sit back and listen to these experts talk, but I'll let Jess, Eric and Wes introduce themselves next.

[00:05:28] Speaker 3: Well, thanks, Blake. I'm Jess Strickland. I'm the VP of sales here at Lawmatics. Still relatively kind of the new guy here. I've been here just over a year. And I've had the opportunity to work in the actually the healthcare space for a long time, focusing more on what Eric and Wes are going to be talking about today, which is digital marketing, websites, SEO, online advertising, all that stuff. And so kind of marrying the two my previous experience and now working in the legal space, running the Lawmatics sales team. So excited to be here. Pass it over to Eric.

[00:06:04] Speaker 2: Thanks, Jess. My name is Eric Tro, COO here at Civil. Been in legal for about two and a half years, been in digital marketing for pretty much as long as I could use a computer. Started making websites when I was in middle school and optimizing them ever since. Did a lot of digital marketing, website development, SEO in the automotive space prior to the legal industry. And excited to share some of the things that I've learned over the last couple of years that can help you succeed in this ever-changing digital landscape.

[00:06:41] Speaker 4: And I'm Wes Lungwitz, co-founder and managing partner of Civil. So a lot of the same background as Eric. We've actually worked together for quite a few years in the automotive space before we made the jump over to legal. And Civil's been going about four years in the legal space. And yeah, we've learned a lot and excited to talk today. Proud Lawmatics integrated partner.

[00:07:09] Speaker 2: Awesome. Okay. Without further ado, I'm going to give you a little bit of a roadmap of where we're going and then we'll jump into the meat of it. My goal in any webinar, I really appreciate everybody taking time out of their day to come talk to us, listen to us, ask questions. I want to make this engaging, informative, and leave you with actionable insights that you can put into place tomorrow, next week. Things that are inspiring and give you substance to work with as you look to make changes in your digital marketing, digital presence, and in your CRM as well. So that's my goal. That's our goal. But specifically what we'll be talking about is how things are changing today, this year, 2025. We'll look at some key components of things that help your website and your digital presence convert miscellaneous internet traffic into real prospects, leads, and matters into paying customers. And then we'll see some tips and tricks as to how you can automate a lot of what we're talking about. What can you do to make this turnkey? A lot of us know what to do. It's just finding time to do it. I see that in the chat already. So what can we do to automate and make this as easy as possible for you to take these actionable steps to find these quick wins? And then we'll leave time to keep Q&A open and be able to talk to the points that matter most to you. So let's get into it. How are things changing? I feel like this first bullet point we've been talking about, it's mobile first. I've been saying this on webinars, presentations for about seven years, 10 years maybe, but it still matters. And what I would say is different about mobile first today as it was years ago is not just the presentation of your content such that it displays in an accessible manner on a mobile device, but thinking more about your content on your website being lightweight enough and locally optimized such that it is accessible on mobile devices and mobile connection speeds. So we'll talk about that more here in a bit. But perhaps the most important or the most noticeable change in what's going on right now is the way in which your site and information is displaying on Google and on search engines before searchers find you. So you can see this example in the screenshot. Somebody searched for how much is an uncontested divorce lawyer in Virginia. Emily, I told you we were featuring in Virginia and here it is. If this search somebody is asking you how much is a certain type of divorce and uncontested divorce cost in my market area. And you can see that the answer was spat out by Google in this AI overview. And so fortunately for law firms, these AI overviews, although trying to present answers to questions to searchers immediately and not sending them directly to websites like law firm websites, this is actually not as bad for law firms as it is for other types of digital properties that are trying to surface answers to questions. Because what happens is if the answer to the question is readily apparent in the search results in this AI overview, I might not be inclined to go take the extra step to go find that same answer on a separate website. I found it on Google. I'm good to go. But obviously in the legal space, folks that are looking for say an uncontested divorce, they're not done there. If they're going to get a divorce, they're going to need to engage a divorce attorney. And so it's important to then be the source of this information that Google is citing in their answer. So you can see this is like, for example, one of our clients is top here answering that question. So if you can still be the foremost authority and provide these answers, even in this new kind of user interface of how the information is being displayed, you still stand to gain traffic and customers by being the trusted voice providing this answer that Google's trusting, that users are trusting, and then driving traffic to the property and converting them into customers. So that is a big change, but one that you can, you know, shouldn't scare you, shouldn't, you know, pull traffic away. It can actually, when done right, help you gain advantage over competitors by surfacing content and answers to questions in this new format and being that trusted firm providing the answers. The last thing is speed and user experience matter. We're going to talk about Google page speed insights here in a second. I think that's the first actionable takeaway that you can take from this is open up a new tab while you're listening to me ramble and Google page speed insights. And you're going to run a test on your site and kind of see where you're at. The important takeaway here is notes from Google that says 53% of users leave a page if it takes over three seconds to load. So it's very important that we're focused not only on mobile usability, but on accessibility and the lightweight structure of the site such that it can load quickly across mobile connection speeds and not deter any of your prospective customers. And again, we're going to talk about that here on this slide. So I told you to open up that new tab. This is what Google page speed insights look like. And this is what we want your report card to look like. All these green numbers. We want high performing websites that are highly accessible with good best practice SEO scores. Why this matters. Not only does it matter in that users will bounce off if it's taking too long for these properties to load for a page to load, but Google has actually published that these scores factor into their ranking algorithm. So if you think about it for a sec, you know, as any business, we want to provide our customers, any B2C business, any business, we want to provide our customers with a good experience. Google is no different. There is no different. And so if Google is going to direct a searcher off of google.com to a website, they want their users to have a good experience. If that site is difficult to access, has poor usability, hard to read, or takes a long time to load, that doesn't equate to a good experience. So Google is going to say, I don't want my searchers to have this bad experience. So if they do bad on this report card, I'm not going to rank you as high. So these kind of foundational technological structure of the website, it matters just as much as the content matters. Because if I can't render a good experience for searchers, then Google is going to say, I'm pushing you down the rankings. So when we think about search engine optimization and climbing in the rankings, we have to take into consideration some of these foundational metrics about just the quality of the site before we even look at things like the content, the keywords, and things like that. So that is something that top performing firms do differently. They have high performing websites that Google likes to see, Google approves them.

[00:15:28] Speaker 4: Really quick, Eric, as you're on that screen, when you look at that, it comes up as mobile in that screenshot. And that's what it's going to show you first. If you bounce over to desktop, a lot of times firms are going to score just fine on the desktop scores. So that's an important thing if you're having these conversations with providers or looking at your own, if they try to tell you the desktop scores are good, that's common, but mobile is where you really need to be and where a lot of people struggle.

[00:15:58] Speaker 2: Yeah, good point. Thank you, Wes. And we're going to talk a lot about automation. So I won't harp on that right now until we kind of get into what's happening inside of automatics or inside a legal CRM. But the last little bullet point on here is investing in credibility. So we've heard of things like SocialProof, you guys are familiar with Yelp, Amazon, Google Business Profiles, and how star ratings matter a lot. But we talk about driving traffic to websites and using best in class contact forms, multi-step forms to improve the website's conversion rate. Well, we first need to really convince the prospect that you're credible, that folks just like the prospect to have had success and a pleasurable experience in working with you. So posting reviews, case studies, and that SocialProof goes a long way to ensure that people will actually take the time to fill out your contact forms or pick up the phone. So let's talk about those contact forms and how you can do things differently today than what has been perhaps commonplace in the past to improve the conversion rate once you are successful in getting traffic to your website. So let's look at this screenshot here on the left where this is an example from an IP intellectual property attorney trademark patent attorney. And so you think of a contact form on a website, you think of enter your name, email, phone, how can we help you? And if you've done a good job of putting the right content on your site, displaying that SocialProof, you're going to get some people to fill that out. But to improve that conversion rate even further, these types of multi-step forms that affirm to the prospect that you are the right firm that can help them with their problem go a long way. So let's look at this just to prove the point. I'm looking for trademark help. Instead of just help with a trademark basic contact form, we're asking questions like, I want to apply for a trademark. I've already applied for a trademark. I need help. Somebody else registered my trademark. Someone is using my trademark without my permission. These are the things that affirm to the prospective client like, oh yeah, this is my issue. This is specifically what I'm dealing with. I'm going to click here and go through this decision tree to help me with the issue that I'm having. And this is far more affirming than just, hey, we do trademarks, give us your name and phone number, we'll be in touch, right? So this is kind of this next generation of intelligent contact forms that are just psychologically proven to improve your conversion rate. So that's a key component of a high converting digital presence is that you have these forms that affirm that you're the right firm for the prospect. And then the second little tidbit here is that not only do they improve your conversion rate, but they help you on the back end because when you receive that lead loaded up with answers to these questions, it qualifies the lead for you. You know exactly what they're looking for, the type of case or matter that they're bringing to the table. And that helps you set different automation rules, who you want to follow up with first, who's the most high value prospect. So it really is this double-edged sword, or I guess what's the idiom for it's, you get the best of both worlds. You get higher conversion rate and you get better lead qualification to help you set those automation rules and follow-up tasks. So let's talk about more top of funnel. How are we going to load the funnel to get people onto our website and get them to consider us and surface your firm as people are asking questions on the web about things pertaining to the services that a law firm offers. So without looking at this, just think for example, if there are five, we'll use the patent attorney or estate planning attorney as an example. Let's say there's five estate planning attorneys in Columbia, Missouri, and they all have websites and they all have Google business profiles, but one of them posts an article to their website and to their Google business profile every two weeks that answers some question pertaining to wills and estates, trusts, etc. Algorithmically, who do you think Google will trust the most as the foremost authority on wills and estates in Columbia, Missouri? Of course, it's the one of the five that is posting this routine content. So this all makes perfect sense. Of course, Google can only look at the data. So the one that's doing the most work to say, I'm the strongest voice. I'm the foremost expert in my community on my practice area. Over time, Google is going to say, well shoot, they're the one answering all the questions pertaining to the things that the searchers are looking for in this market area. So we use this little acronym, EAT, showing what Google wants to see. They want to see experience in your practice area, expertise, authority, and trust, that social proof. And in providing that through routine content, answering these questions, then you're going to get rewarded. And then the obviously local SEO, we want to rank in our market area, but long tail keywords. So when we talk about writing content, what we really want to do is answer these questions in the long tail. So longer search terms like questions like this, what does trust or how do I put my property into a trust in the state of Wisconsin? When we think of search terms that we want to rank for, a lot of people think of just these, you know, very like to the point, I'm looking for a divorce attorney in Annapolis or a state planning attorney in Wisconsin. The fact of the matter is not everybody's searching for that. Before I go and contact an estate planning attorney, I might ask a question like, how do I put my property into a trust? So that I'm more educated on this, so that when I do contact an attorney, I'm not running up my billable hours because I've educated myself a little bit. So when you write content routinely, you're showing Google that you are an authority on your practice areas and you're educating your prospects and they establish trust with you as an authority on this subject. So content again, it helps you in multiple ways. Climbing rankings, establishing trust, and yeah, you know, giving Google these, the confidence that you are these things that they're looking for as people are searching. So this is from a third party, our sources, just this third party that shows that when you are routinely publishing content that aims to answer questions, that law firms are getting 3x the amount of traffic and twice as many leads. And that stands to reason more traffic and more leads, you know, more traffic will equate to more leads. And so it all makes perfect sense if you kind of just go top to bottom on connecting the dots here. But I, you know, we want to use third party information, but to me, these charts are a little underwhelming. So we also included some things that we have found. These are from our own clients, and this is not necessarily to boast, but really to substantiate the point that when you're doing this well and correctly and your competitors are not, content strategy and conversion optimization on your website can have a dramatic effect on your ability to attract and engage prospective clients. So you can see these numbers are huge, right? Like when you're doing this and competitors are not, and you haven't been doing anything in the past, it truly can over the span of time, have this immense value add to your ability to attract customers. I want to intro Wes here a little bit. Wes is probably, I would say, one of the foremost experts on what he's about to show you. Of anybody, I'm going to say it, in the world, he's been doing digital marketing for 15, 20 years. And what I like about Wes and his approach to just this industry, Wes has always been a player coach. He's managed teams of dozens of folks, but at the same time, he's always engaged with clients and continued to render services himself so that he understands what the trends are, how to use these tools, and having that expertise in digital marketing and now in the legal space for the past half decade, truly one of the most knowledgeable guys you could find on planet earth to help teach you about how to optimize your Google business profile to help climb rankings. So I think as far as actionable insights and takeaways go, this is a great little bits of information to take away and see how you can do more to optimize your Google business profile so that you show up in those maps results when people are searching for things that you do. So I'll stop sharing Wes so that you can, and I will shut up for a bit.

[00:26:40] Speaker 1: All right.

[00:26:41] Speaker 4: Can you see on my screen? We are good, yes. Okay. Thank you for that incredible oversell there on the Google business profile. No, I appreciate it. I wanted to start out, so we do this a lot, kind of auditing Google business profiles for law firms, obviously. And a lot of times it's like, well, I think somebody's doing something and I'm not sure if I have access and I think somebody has access and there's a lot of unknown things with Google business profile, right? So I wanted to start out, right? How do you know if your Google business profile is in a good spot from a visual perspective? If you don't have access to the backend, I just want to get a good feel, something you can look at right now as I'm talking, if you want. So quick way, just Google your law firm name and it should show up over here. So this is TABAC Law. So this is a SSDI VA benefits, workers comp and personal injury attorney in Milwaukee. So social security disability is their main thing and VA benefits. So just looking at this, first thing, is there a nice picture of your team right here? That's going to be a big, big factor right away. I've seen all kinds of things, empty chairs, just random pictures of the street, just different things that happen that Google generate or users will add that if you don't have anything added, that's what people are seeing when they pull up your firm, right? And a lot of times this is going to be most important on mobile, right? That in the local pack, local search, that we can see that you have a real, real photo here. This is your team. The other thing is right down as we go down the stack here, reviews. So it's somebody responding to reviews, huge factor where Google places value on that. Every little thing that you do that I'm showing here is adding value. So similar to how Eric was talking about adding content to the site, adding more value, Google sees all these changes and all these interactions with customers or adding content to the Google business profile, all as positive interactions and things that are going to help you rank, ultimately rank in the local pack where you want to be. The third thing would be looking at this. So the name, address, phone number, right? Name is correct. And your actual legal name. People sometimes put some different keywords or variations in there that can get flagged. You want this to be your actual name. Is the address the one that's appearing on your site as well? Phone number. So I know it's attractive. You can put a tracking number on Google business profile. I don't recommend that it should be a local number. And if you have a tracking phone number on your website, that's okay. Call rail or whatever you're using for call tracking. You can in the code still have this local number visible so that there is a match between the two with the website and the Google business profile, which is a big deal. Another thing. So Google posts, this is just adding content to the Google business profile. So if you don't have this populated, if they're not current, then nobody's updating that. You know, Tabac has a couple different things. One of their attorneys was featured on the local news, just a fun St. Patrick's Day event. And then a big win in the veteran space that they had. So variations of different posts that they can do, just keeping more content active. And then product section. This is essentially just another landing page that you can have for people to go into your services. This will go right to your practice area of your actual site. So those are some visual things that you can look at to see, you know, is my profile up to snuff? And then you can do the actual searches. So if you're searching SSDI attorney Milwaukee, showing up number one, and then different variations of your keywords as well. So the variation of that disability, you're going to be Milwaukee disability attorney, right? They're showing up number one for that as well. Other thing that they do, VA benefits attorneys, number one for that. And then workers comp is their fourth kind of outside practice area. And they're showing up first for that as well with this provides. So we'll talk about that in a second. Now, you don't have to rank first for everything. Obviously, that's probably not going to be the reality all the time. But you want to be somewhere, right? This is the three pack, you can expand that to more businesses for your main practice area, you should be showing up if you're doing some of these things, right. And if it's laying dormant, a lot of times you're likely not. So looking into the back end a little bit how that all happens. So first thing is, profile strength is good. You want this all green circle here, because that tells that's Google saying, everything's updated. And it looks good. They even tell you so profile, the main thing, editing your profile, again, business name, categories is huge. So if you have a category that can that is your main service area that Google allows, now they don't allow every practice area for every attorney to be a category. But if they do, Social Security attorney obviously is their main, that's their primary. You can put these secondary in here as well lawyer, law firm, personal injury, attorney, they do a little bit of personal injury. So it makes sense to do that. VA benefits and workers comps are not categories that Google allows. So they don't have that in there. So we do that a different way that I'll go in a second. Description, make sure it's accurate, recent relevant, I still see some that have like COVID-19, you know, disclaimers and things like that. And obviously, Google can see that right away, they haven't been updated in a while. Opening date, just different things that you can do to fully fill this out is how you get that that full green circle as well. So read reviews. So this is saying that there are reviews that aren't responded to. So this will tell you right away, they get so many. So we go in there regularly, daily and respond to these the team does, but you know, they got some today already that that haven't been responded to. But you go in and see this, everything's not being responded to. You can add photos as well. So if you have photos of your team, you get new headshots taken, you're doing events, different wins, just adding photos, it's adding more value, you're showing that you're updating your profile on a regular basis. Now, if you've just been going through this and not listening, this is one of the big ones. So edit services, this is going to be the one of the big like flashing lights, this is a big thing that you can do, you can add keywords as services on the back end of this. So this is how it's possible for this to happen. If you are, you know, an attorney that has multiple practice areas, or your practice area isn't one that Google has as a category, you can see that tabac showing up first for that workers comp attorney Milwaukee keyword. This provides workers compensation attorneys. That's where that comes from, is the keywords. So as we're looking, you know, we're going to find that one exactly. That's the exact words and phrases with the posture and everything that use it's pulling right from there. So we regularly add keywords weekly that are relevant keyword variations, just different things that people might search that can help with those rankings as well. It's a very big one adding services. Again, Google Business Profiles, a lot of work, right? Updating all these different things, adding service keywords, responding to reviews, adding the posts, making sure your product section is built out all the different things that you can do on a weekly basis. But it's just like the website, you know, when it comes to SEO, website, it's going to be one a the Google Business Profile be one be right, they work together in many ways. And local search, there's no better way to be found. But it just takes a lot of work to, to get in there and do it. Little things also people ask questions, you can answer those, those are usually ones that have high volume. Sometimes people answer themselves. You as the firm are allowed to answer those questions as well just shows more activity. Obviously, your hours correct. Everything like that. So that's, again, you don't have to be ranking first, but you want to do that visual check, see is somebody actually updating this? Are we doing the right things? And then there's all this SEO work that you can do on a weekly basis to really help you show up. And a lot of traffic gains, a lot of customers, you know, are going to find you in that three pack locally. And it's just a huge lead driver for you. All right.

[00:35:01] Speaker 1: I'm gonna just jump in ask a quick question for you guys. I think, you know, looking through some of the answers that the attendees on this webinar put in today, it's a lot of it is resources and time and, you know, not having enough of it. So with these rankings and the criteria that Google's looking for, a lot of it is content. If I'm an attorney and I don't have a lot of extra hours, but I'm still trying to generate leads, I know work has to be done. But like, what is what in your mind, like, what is the sweet spot for how much content do I need to be putting out there? What, you know, is it quality over quantity? Is it quantity over quality? I think that would be interesting to know is, you know, how much realistically do I need to be putting out there from a content standpoint to make this worthwhile?

[00:35:45] Speaker 4: Yeah, for sure. It's a good question. I mean, quality is always going to be most important right now, especially in the age of AI. You know, putting a lot of AI content on your sites, and this is getting into the weeds a little bit. We did a test on this internally. And I have a video out on that, that the site over a couple of months just started to tank because that's all that was being added was low quality content generated by AI, right? We just wanted to know. It's not a practice that we do, but we hear that a lot, like, well, I can just have AI create this. This was one test, but it didn't work out well. And ultimately, if you're single prompt, and then putting something out, or just writing it yourself, but it's like a couple hundred words, it's just low quality, right? That's not something, especially in the age of AI and the overview that Eric showed that is going to be the result above all others that Google chooses to feature. And ultimately, it reward your site for reward your overall domain authority. So to the question, I guess, if you have the time to do it, Google is going to crawl your site a couple times a month, right? Every time that it gets crawled, it's nice if you have a couple new pieces of relevant content to add. So, you know, we would recommend, you know, four quality posts, like one every week, if you have the time for it. If you can even do a couple, that's certainly better than nothing. But the key is only do it if you have the time to really do a quality or have somebody that can do that for you. Pounding out low quality content isn't, you know, that's been out for a long time, but it's even more risky in the age of AI.

[00:37:30] Speaker 2: So I'll share again and kind of jump back into it. But yeah, thank you, Wes, and good takeaways there. Again, think of how a machine is going to help evaluate which digital property is the best. And we talked about, you know, routine quality content development, of course, but those routine little tweaks and updates to the Google business profile, it shows that you're active, engaged, connecting with your community, with your customers, by responding to reviews, adding those little services that Wes mentioned. All those things just algorithmically are showing Google that you're more of an authority, you're easier to trust than somebody lying dormant, not doing anything with their website or anything with their Google business profile. So those consistent quality tweaks to both your website and its content and your Google business profile are really the secret sauce. So there's a ton of questions.

[00:38:31] Speaker 4: Shout out to Aaron in the chat for actually posting my blog on that topic. There's a video on our YouTube as well.

[00:38:38] Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, thanks, Aaron. That's the case study that Wes is mentioning. So there's a lot of questions about automation. I want to be aware of time. So without, you know, I kind of want to skim over a couple of these slides and jump into the part where we get into automatics and Jess can talk more about automation. So we talked about converting traffic into leads using high quality contact forms. I think we get it. This is another example of using a multi-step form to qualify leads to help you not only get a higher conversion rate, but to better understand who's a quality prospect that you want to engage with and maybe set different automation rules for. This is another example of an intake process that can be sent to a customer after they submitted a particular lead or went through a series of questions to understand their high value. And then lastly, you know, tying it all together and understanding the value that was generated from all of this traffic engagement and ultimately conversion into paid customers from your website. Before we get into that, I want to show an example of how this works from end to end. And then Jess will come back and talk a little bit more about both the automation and reporting and insights. So I'll do another quick live demonstration here. Where is my... I should probably stop sharing while I pull this up. Give me one second.

[00:40:25] Speaker 1: Okay. All right. Sharing again.

[00:40:27] Speaker 2: Okay. So this is our integrations page. We're just showing an example of how lead forms can integrate into Lawmatics from your website. So here's a contact form that I'll fill out quickly. Actually, let's do an appointment because that's kind of cooler. Some of our firms will use this appointment scheduler to help schedule phone calls. So once they've actually become a customer and they're interested in scheduling their first appointment, they can use a scheduler like this to submit their information. So we'll do this. We'll jump into Lawmatics and we'll let Wes describe more of the magic that happens after the lead is submitted. So I'm going to just quickly just book an appointment for Friday at 11 a.m. Hit continue. I'm going to do Jess Strickland, jstrick at 43 at hotmail.com. And we'll do a fake phone number. Hopefully it doesn't get flagged and spam. Stricklandplc.com. Okay. So again, this is our kind of proprietary scheduler. I can add these appointments to their Google calendar. But really what I want to show you is how when you have integrations between your website and your CRM, like Lawmatics, you don't have to wait for an email to come in to say, oh, here, a lead was filled out. I can just go into Lawmatics and go to my calendar and bang, you literally just saw that pop up. I didn't hit refresh. Nothing. I just went into my calendar and bang, here's that new appointment. You can see where it says Jess Strickland right there. And if I go into people, contacts, Jess Strickland, again, didn't hit refresh or anything. It just seamlessly integrates. So that when we talk about integrated from website to CRM, that's what we're talking about. No more administrative hassle of going into your email inbox, finding the leads, punching them into Lawmatics. It's all right there for you. So that's an example of the integration. But then what happens after that? The contacts in there, the appointments in there, the matters created. What about these automations that really save you additional time besides re-keying information from email into Lawmatics? I turn it over to you, Jess, and I will guide my mouse or guide you through here or stop sharing if you want to show a separate instance.

[00:43:09] Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe what I'll do, thanks, Eric. Maybe what I'll have you do is stop sharing and I can kind of pick up maybe just like fictitiously in terms of what would happen if I was in that same instance, but just to be able to show a little bit more of kind of the environment. And I think I'll start by just saying the stuff that Eric and Wes are talking about, again, it just brings back so many memories for me specifically, because I've talked about this stuff for eight years of my life, specifically in the healthcare space. And all of the stuff that they are talking about is such valuable insight. And it's industry agnostic, right? But these things are like really, really impactful for building out an organic SEO presence that is going to support you for the long term. And I think that's a big part with SEO is this isn't some quick fix, right? These things have to be controlled and it's something that builds over time. But what happens when the online presence starts to really take action? What happens when authority really starts to be gained with Google and you're starting to be shown up? Typically, lead volume increases, right? If your reputation is growing, if you're seeing more cases, more people are leaving positive reviews, and then Google is giving you that authority, more leads are likely going to be finding you, right? Or maybe you're doing more Google advertising and you're investing more in online marketing because you're like, hey, you know what? I need to hit the gas pedal on growth. I want to build my firm. I want to hire more attorneys. I want to be the biggest, baddest attorney in the space. I need to start to put a lot of money into it. What we hear on a very consistent basis, my team, is how do we manage this lead volume? We're already strapped for resources. I saw it in the chat, too many things and not enough hands. It's a common theme that we hear. And this is where the power of automation can really come into play, so if someone were to submit the lead similarly to the way that Eric showed, I'll just walk you guys through just an example and just to make sure you guys got my screen here. I just want to make sure. Cool. So again, in this particular instance, and imagine this is the same instance that Eric was just working off of, I submitted a lead as Jess, it would pop into a pipeline stage. And the beauty of having a pipeline is to make it easy for the staff to be able to determine where in their lead funnel are the leads coming and where are they at in particular. And all of this stuff can happen again automatically. So in that instance that Eric talked about, I submitted a lead, it automatically would pop into an intake pipeline. And the real key thing here that I want to show is there's a lot of different stages that happen within that lead's lifecycle. They're initially a new lead, they inquire, maybe they call in, maybe they submit it through the web. But opening it up to the chat a little bit, what are some of the steps that typically have to take or be taken to move that lead along the process? What are some of the things that your team, maybe you as an individual, if that's one of your roles within the firm, what are some of the stuff that needs to be done? And I can't see the chat right now, so maybe you guys can call it out, Blake, if you see anything getting answered. But there's a lot of different things, right? Maybe it's a consultation needs to be scheduled. Maybe an intake form needs to be sent out. Maybe, like Eric showed, a scheduling needs to be shared. Maybe a retainer agreement needs to be sent and signed, right? And all of these things require a human in most instances to be the one to do it. And that's where it feels like a lot of times staff are getting really bogged down. And so you can see within a pipeline, the beauty here is, I'm not going to get in the weeds and actually show you guys the automations behind it, but every one of these stages within a pipeline can have really powerful automations based off of what you guys determine as part of your process. So if a new lead come in and we say immediately we want an intake form to be sent out where we're capturing information about that particular client or that particular PNC, we want to know what type of case they're coming to us for, what type of practice area, maybe key information. If there's qualification questions that you guys have as a standard operating procedure, we want that to be automatically sent out and not have to have our staff be the one that says, oh, I got this lead. I now have to manually be the one to remember to go send this out. And then we get the intake form and now I've got to import all of this information into a system or a spreadsheet. And now I've got a schedule and I have to remember to be the one to schedule the call. And oh, now I'm going back and forth trying to do phone tag because they're not always available when I call. And so this is some of the areas where we really focus in on when building out these pipelines is these automations are powering the action so that we can move someone from a new lead in some instances all the way through to that hired stage with very little work being done by the staff. So that team can be focused on the high value work that you guys really care about them doing. And so the other component that I think is really important with this is that same idea of we're doing all of this work to generate more leads, but we don't have a way to track them. Where are they going? We don't know where things fall through. We don't know if that was a quality lead. We don't know. Maybe if it wasn't a quality lead, what do we do? Typically, maybe it's a practice area that we can't take. Now the staff has to disengage with them. That's one more task that gets on their list. These are things where we can say, hey, if they didn't hit these qualification benchmarks that you guys determine, we want to automatically disengage, maybe refer out to one of my referral partners that we love to send cases to that fit this criteria. And it just takes that work off of the team's plate so that they're not having to do it. And so making it easier for people, the teams and the staffs to stay on top of all of the leads so that these valuable leads that you guys are either spending money on or doing all the work that Eric and Wes are talking about to generate that organic presence are not getting lost by the wayside or slipping through the cracks because the team doesn't have the bandwidth to do all of this manual work that typically takes place. And so usually when I'm talking to attorneys or firms that are investing in this type of strategy, the other thing that they sometimes will struggle with is how do we determine whether or not these are actually converting? Are they actually working? Is this SEO an effort and all this stuff that we're doing? And so this is where the idea of reporting becomes super powerful. And a lot of times what I hear are people having to leverage spreadsheets. They're going into Excel and they're aggregating all the data and trying to put together a snapshot view of what happened over the course of the month. Having something like a lotmatics or any CRM is going to really allow for you to harness all of that information and make it really visually appealing without the manual steps. Just for an example sake, if you're doing all of these different types of advertising motions, let's just say like for Google, you can see the leads that are coming in. You can see the spend that you're putting in place for that particular keyword or that particular campaign. And then because we have all of the data in terms of the leads coming in, how it's tracking through the funnel and if it becomes a hired state, now very easily we can say, hey, these leads that came in from this particular campaign actually converted at X amount of percentage. You can see ROI calculations. You can have a really good sense and say, you know what, that campaign is really producing for us. We want to invest more in here. And maybe there's campaigns that you're tracking and you don't see good success. Maybe you're getting a bunch of leads, but they're all unqualified. None of them are retaining. Now I can easily make that informed decision to say, you know what, this campaign is not working for us. We want to reallocate these resources to the places that are driving revenue and helping us grow our business. And now we're really powering our decisions and informing our decisions with insight versus hopes and dreams and gut and feel, right? Which sometimes we can get into that world where we think this works better, or we think this is a better way to drive leads, or we think this is our best referral partner, our best lead source, but we don't have the data to confidently be able to say that with a hundred percent certainty. And we want to take that guesswork and make sure that any informed decision that we're making is powered by data. And so again, without getting too into the weeds, the reporting capabilities, this is one of the things that the firms that do leveraged automatics, I think their eyes really open up with is being able to determine the value of these different campaigns and see the growth of lead volume and what that's actually translating to in terms of conversion, new cases, and the actual revenue growth from the efforts that they're putting forth. So again, custom reports, you can do analytics, you can see everything from a visual standpoint. I'm a visual person. I look at sales dashboards all day long for my sales team. And so I need to know these things the exact same way. I need to know how many leads that we're getting. I need to know if we've reached out to those new inquiries immediately. I want to know if we've gotten meetings booked. I want to know if those meetings have performed. I want to know if the meeting actually ended in a new customer. And so very similarly, that's how you guys can operate your business by having all these insights and data at your fingertips. And so I'll stop sharing and just bring it back to the group because I know we're tight on time. So Blake, I'll kick it back over to you.

[00:53:13] Speaker 1: Yeah, perfect. Eric, before you bring up the screen, I just want to add on to that. I mean, the automation aspect of things is it takes work, but it's like just like everything else we discussed. You put in the work and the effort to get that Google profile, get your SEO up, and you all of a sudden, I talk to firms all the time who do the work. And then all of a sudden, they're like, well, now my problem is I have too many leads and I don't know what to do with it. And I'm like, that's not a problem. That's a good thing. But being able to have the automation, they're Googling you on their couch on a Sunday night, right? You're not working, hopefully. But if they go and schedule something immediately, Monday morning, if automations have run, you show up to your office and you have everything you already need. They're on your calendar. A conflict check has been run. So, you know, you can actually work with them. It's powerful. It's like you have to beat your competitors to the punch and communication and automation is truly the only way to do that with everything you've got going on.

[00:54:11] Speaker 2: We've just got a couple of minutes left. Go ahead and throw any questions you want into chat. We'll try to get them before the end of time here. And as you're putting questions in, I'll go through our summary slides here. If you want to take screenshots or whatever, these are our key takeaways. We've got a few slides for you. Our quick wins and best practices. Use that Google PageSpeed Insights tool. Really focus on improving your Google business profile. That's something that if you're not a web developer, but you have a Gmail account or a Google account to manage your Google business profile, anybody can do that. And then, of course, you know, this is working with a vendor. Those bottom two bullet points here, but using intelligent forms to improve your conversion rate and then everything Jess was talking about in automated workflows once those leads come in. What else we got for you? Some pitfalls to avoid. Obviously, run that PageSpeed Insights test. See if you're getting red numbers, yellow numbers. Google telling you there's lots of room to improve. Logging into your Google business profile, not seeing that green circle and then not having automation set up so you're not responding to leads quickly and the lead moves on to the next personal injury attorney or whatever else because you didn't respond in a timely manner. And so and here are the key takeaways. You want to have that well-optimized digital presence that is highly accessible and usable across all devices. Your Google business profile, when it's well-optimized, is going to drive significant visibility and engagement locally. In integrations between your digital properties and or digital property and your CRM can produce a ton of efficiencies and cut down on a lot of manual administrative process and that contributes to those fast lead follow-ups that are going to help you get those engagement letters out. So any chats come in while I was summarizing?

[00:56:24] Speaker 1: We do. We have one question and yeah so please, we have a few minutes left. If you have questions, please put them in the chat. Your first question is on average, if you consider going zero to you know 12 months and having everything in perfect position, I guess is what this is saying, but like how long does it typically take to start seeing? Start seeing what? Like how long before you start seeing, like if you start putting in the work on Google business, when do you see a turnaround I guess a little bit?

[00:57:01] Speaker 2: I would say it depends on where you're at and where your competitors are at. Sometimes quick fixes can provide instant like within a few days type of lift from being you know 37th to 16th, but generally with search engine optimization, again a lot of variables at play here, you're going to see best case scenario three months, average six months, and certainly within a year, nine months to a year, these routine types of practices will yield benefit. The good news about these types of practices is like once you do it, once you climb those rankings and you continue to do it, it's very hard to get dethroned. So if you, as you make these incremental gains over time, you can be confident that if you sustain those practices, you'll sustain your ranking.

[00:57:58] Speaker 1: Awesome. And then Kelly did ask if we could go back one slide maybe to take a quick screenshot.

[00:58:07] Speaker 2: I also saw Natalia, you asked how do we integrate your website with Llamatics. So that is Llamatics has an API that they provided to Sybil and we built to those specifications to be able to post information that we receive into Llamatics. So it really just depends on the website provider. Of course we'd love to talk to you if you want an integrated website, but I know that there are other website providers that are integrated with Llamatics, but a lot of times you can just ask them, hey are you integrated with Llamatics? I heard they have an API, can you integrate with Llamatics? And so, you know, competent web development providers and agencies are going to be able to do that for you. And Llamatics certainly made it easy for Sybil to do it.

[00:58:56] Speaker 3: Yeah. The other thing too is, you know, a lot of the forms can just be web embedded forms that Llamatics can build into your website. And so a lot of the information that you would typically capture within an intake and being able to build, you know, all of the dynamic fields from qualifications, if there's certain questions that you typically want to have asked to either qualify or disqualify or capture more information so that, you know, you can feel really good in terms of your team's preparedness to reach out to that particular lead or maybe even differentiate, right? If there's certain questions that you ask and if the answer is this, we want to prioritize and we want to make sure that this is the first in our queue to follow up with, these web embedded forms that we build out can, you know, live on your website and they can, you know, funnel right into Llamatics when someone, you know, submits information through them.

[00:59:48] Speaker 2: Great point. So you can have a, you know, an integration from the website natively, or if the web provider doesn't do that or they can't help you with that, just, and Llamatics team can provide you with forms that you can embed, you know, copy and paste code, use their forms that are, of course, integrated with Llamatics.

[01:00:08] Speaker 3: And that's probably the majority of our customers are leveraging the web embedded forms just because of the ease of use and our team builds them out for you, which when resources are strapped in, that's definitely something that they lean on us for. And we've got, obviously, a ton of forms that are kind of out of the box that can help with that.

[01:00:29] Speaker 1: Cool. And we have one more question. We've got just a minute left that says, do you have any suggestions so our Llamatics form will load more quickly on our website? It could be a website thing. It could be the way that you've had it embedded. I would suggest reaching out to us and we can make sure that it's set up in a way that's being embedded into the website and at least kind of try to find a solution in there. But definitely the full embed of the form onto the website, it should be loading at a pretty quick pace. But we can definitely help you take a look at that offline.

[01:01:07] Speaker 3: Our support or any of us can help look into that and make sure that everything's built properly so that it's not lagging behind.

[01:01:16] Speaker 1: For sure. Well, everyone, thank you so much for attending today. We are out of time. Eric, Wes, it was great having you on here. You guys, full of just great information. I mean, I learned a lot myself, too. It was awesome. And Jess, thank you so much. Thank you again, everyone, for attending. We are excited to have you here today and we hope that you'll join us next month for our monthly webinar, which is going to be seven surefire ways to increase the lifetime value of your clients. So we'll be sending out information soon. You'll receive a survey. We'd love for after this. We'd love for your feedback. And until next time, thanks so much. Thanks, everybody.

[01:01:54] Speaker 4: Thanks all. Thank you.