BluShark Digital
Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price
Thrilled to have Casey Meraz here, founder of Juris Digital. Welcome.
Casey Meraz
Thank you. Good to be here, Seth, I appreciate it.
Seth Price
You know, would love to get your perspective. We are, you know, as we talk just off camera, you know, we are working in a fully virtual world, you know, the agency model, which is not an easy one to scale. You took the bold step, pre-COVID, have completely, you know, given up the lease. Talk to me about that process. We were forced to do that, but did not have the foresight you did to sort of try that pre-COVID.
Casey Meraz
Sure, yeah. So for us, it basically just started, we wanted to figure out how we can attract the best talent, get, you know, the best people on board. And we were finding that a lot of these people were remote and didn't really want to relocate, necessarily. And so for the end, at the end of the day, for us, it came to the thought that we can do this from anywhere, and we want to give people you know, a place to work that they're happy with and where location isn't going to be an issue. But, you know, it's come with its fair share of challenges. You know, I can't say that we were fully prepared, even though we thought about it and started before COVID, there was still just a lot of stumbling, and learning, lessons to be learned throughout the process.
Seth Price
You know, one of the things that I've, I've seen is that, you know, we have historically, at BluShark, done a lot of training from within. Talk to me a little bit about, are you, do you find that by having a national or frankly international catchment area that you've been able to bring stronger players in? Do you, how much do you, how much of your time do you spend training, you know, raw talent versus finding people with skill sets that are sort of fit into what you need to do?
Casey Meraz
Yeah, you know, that's a good question. Right now, we typically, we have two levels that we hire for, really. One is people with a lot of experience and bring a lot, we hope for some sort of legal background, but that's not necessarily the case and that's a very narrow pool, it seems, like of talent to find, so. And then the other is we train people up. Now thankfully, a lot of the training that we created was already virtual through Teachable and things like that, courses that we've made internally. But if I'm being completely honest, we have a long way to go to get to where we want to be, so that we could bring somebody in to hit the ground running. And that's become more apparent, as we've, you know, acquired another company with different processes and trying to merge those things together at the same time. So that took us about five steps back, where now we're kind of recreating and merging everything from scratch into one system, one training, and making it a lot more robust. So we will have, or at least we hope we'll have, the ability to train anybody up from anywhere, and get them at least on the same page with everything we need. But it's, it is going to be a lot of training. It's a lot of work, and it is nice, though, that we can systemize it and make it certification-based though as well.
Seth Price
That's awesome. So my question to you is, you know, you had this experience of acquiring, you know. With private equity the way it is right now, they're constantly knocking on the door, and, you know, we've had a few people sort of say, "Hey, we want to be acquired." You actually did it, which is kind of cool, right? A lot of people talk about it, talk to me about lessons learned of acquiring a group to to grow through acquisition.
Casey Meraz
Sure, yeah. So I mean, it's definitely, it was our first acquisition so we learned a lot of lessons, probably the hard way. But I think we did a lot of things the right way, too. And the first lesson I would say, would be culture based. It's, you know, really making sure that you're paying attention to the team, what the team culture is like with the company that you're working with and your culture, and really put a plan together of how you're going to merge those and move together. So we were fortunate when we did this, that we were able to keep everybody on board and merge the cultures. But you, you could see right away where there could be a lot of bumps in the road, where people have different expectations. And even though we did our best to try to over-communicate, "Hey, you guys are going to stay with our company, you're going to migrate with it, you're going to help us build this," we learned kind of after the fact that every day they kind of thought, still, that, you know ,maybe they weren't going to keep us around. So we could have done a better job at really communicating that plan, making it very clear, and that's something we're constantly refining as well just for the company too. Our direction, making sure not only is that clear but that everybody knows it and we keep repeating it and keep that going to get all the people in the right seats on the bus there.
Seth Price
And I would think that it's, you know, obviously that's a great Jim Collins reference. But you know, one of the things is you know, your answer is: we really want, because you probably, like, hiring people is a pain in the ass, if you have people, you want them, and you're looking to keep everybody, but the sort of caveat, the unspool caveat is, if you can't get with our cultural program, you probably won't work out. Meaning, this is not just towards you, this is just in general, that's sort of like, this delicate dance, right? Because in one sense, you really do want, like, we know how hard it is to recruit, and to get somebody who knows what they're doing at the company or, you know, G-- was a great founder who sort of, was sort of ahead of the curve on many things, including, you know, leveraging video, and all sorts of cool stuff. But at the flip side is, you know, you guys have spent a lot of time working on company culture and it's always a crapshoot as to whether or not somebody else is gonna morph, or it's not the way things used to be after a merger.
Casey Meraz
Sure, and we did experience that. We had, we did have one person that didn't end up working out. And, you know, not to go into really any details there, but yeah, I mean, it just wasn't gonna work out. And luckily, we had a process in place for how we were going to, you know, deal with that. And we followed that, and it worked, and there was no, you know, it didn't mess up anything else, which is always a fear, as well, like, hey, there's too much happening at once. We're acquiring a company, some people are leaving, not everybody. You know, I'm always afraid to rock the boat, I think, was something else I just wanted to throw out there, because that's where things seem to get hairy.
Seth Price
You guys have done, you know, scaled digital marketing SEO in the legal space. What are some of the things, trends, what do you see working right now? What do you see, some of the areas that you're deemphasizing? How do you, how do you look at the digital landscape for lawyers today?
Casey Meraz
Sure. So really, a lot of it hasn't changed. I think one thing that's changed for us is just based on some new click test studies that we've been doing, saying, "Hey, where are our potential clients looking for attorneys online? Where are they clicking?" And, you know, we've seen a larger, larger reduction than I expected in organic traffic. So obviously, that has to do with LSAs and to some extent, and then just local results, people are just more and more familiar with them. And they know that Google localizes the search results by the searcher's location. So, you know, we're just getting a lot more traffic and clicks there. So I think in the short term, the only thing that we've really changed is really focusing our long term growth strategies for our clients on thinking: if you want to dominate this market, not only do we have to expand your proximity there on the local side, but we have to think about what it looks like outside of the city too, and what that growth plan looks like. All while still doing the organic side of things for SEO, but, you know, and, because, obviously, you need that, and they correlate as far as ranking factors go. But I'm just, I guess that's what I'm saying is, it'll be de-emphasized to a small extent in the future, just based on these continued click studies that we have.
Seth Price
You know, amazed that you found a way to work internationally, it's sort of, you're my hero in that respect. Over the summers, having spent time in Italy, and loving the idea that you could sort of like spend the day with the family and then, you know, when the world, when the US is getting up, you know, get some work in and then return for dinner, I found to be a really neat lifestyle. Talk to me a little bit about that, it seems like you've found a way to mix personal with business.
Casey Meraz
Yeah, you know, I'm really around, I'm big on lifestyle optimization, so, and you know, time is the thing that we can't buy more of, so anything that I can do to save time, I'm on board with. So with that being said, it took a long time to get to this point, I don't think a lot of people saw that part. But it came down to systemising, you know, building all these processes, and then putting the right people in to run the company. I found that, you know, even though I'm in charge of everything, the more that I'm in the weeds or, you know, helping the company from all these, this macro level, the worse I think we do. So I'm more of that visionary. I can say, "Hey, this is what we're, this is the direction that the ship is heading. And these are the things we need to do to get there." But I need my team to execute on these things and giving them that control not only has freed up my time, and you know, allowed me to spend a lot of time with my young kids, but travel, too, like, we just spent a couple of weeks on a catamaran, you know, floating around the British Virgin Islands. And that wasn't something I could have ever done in the corporate world.
Seth Price
No, absolutely. You know, and I also, I found that, you know, I get, I feel you, I get the, the visionary piece. I also find that as I've gotten older, it's hard to relate to some of the workforce, and that having managers between me and the workforce has gone huge. And when I do have to deal, that it doesn't always go smoothly, that I'm sort of 17 steps ahead and impatience is certainly something that's come with age, so that we're sort of stuck at a point where even if I wanted to be in the weeds, I'm probably not the best suited person, or certainly not the best suited person for that at this stage of life. Have you, you know, are there any things that you've done to try to keep yourself in the weeds, or have you really extracted yourself and have a team around you that tries to take care of the day to day pieces so that you can work on your business and E-Myth it?
Casey Meraz
Yeah. So I, so I am a practitioner at heart, speaking of E-Myth, and from an SEO side, I still spend time in there just because I like it. And it's always changing. And that's one of the things I like about working in legal: it's so competitive, and people are always going above and beyond doing crazy stuff that I'm always learning just to try to compete in, in these competitive areas. So I always have one foot in with that and I work with one client kind of part time just to kind of, to do that and to push myself. But outside of that, from, you know, the, the business, the other business stuff that has to be done, I'm pretty much outside of that. So that's been nice, at least.
Seth Price
What are some of the things that you, you see, we talked about the importance of three pack, LSAs. Where do you see things heading over the next few years? Like, where are you, if you were sort of future-looking and trying to say, "Hey, these are the areas that if you were sort of trying to allocate resources going forward." Where do you think that smart money is being put?
Casey Meraz
Yeah, you know, I think that my answer will, is basically always going to be the same, it's going to be geared around share of search. Like any opportunity you have for real estate to show up where your potential clients are looking, if that's going to be something that's going to convert for you, that makes sense to be there. So obviously, your own website, LSAs, you know, paid search. But I gotta tell you, most of our clients that, you know, they, their success is seen in the long term, organic and local game, that's where they're getting most of their cases, most of their leads, even with all of these changes. So while we're still encouraging our clients to have the budget, to be in LSAs, and, you know, being paid, and even be in certain directories that rank for those important keywords in your specific market, you know, that, that advice hasn't changed, it's got to be the same moving forward. I think Google will try to monetize more, because I mean, they keep doing it, so something will change, but my overall advice won't.
Seth Price
No. You know, one of the things that I've seen, it would be curious to get your thoughts on, just agency owner to agency owner, has been a sort of a change in perspective on organic search. I felt like when we started, and I was in a law firm owner who spun this out, and, you know, working with with law firms, people looked at organic almost as, it was called free search. And, you know, people expected, hey, I should be getting crazy ROI from this, and for a long time, if you, especially if you go back a decade or more, it was insane, you could really do amazing stuff. Google obviously wants to make money, they keep turning the the ratchet, we have LSAs, less, you know, less and less real estate for organic or the real estate that's there is pushed further down. But what I am seeing is that as, particularly in the injury space, as TV costs have gone up, the cost of case acquisition, to pretty absurd numbers in certain markets, more than $2,500 per case, some places over $3000 cases in certain select markets, that organic is being looked at differently. Not as, I should be paying this and gathering an unlimited troth of potential cases, but rather, what you're looking at is what is done on the organic side, on a cost per case basis. And that when looked at that way, all of a sudden, it's looked at extremely favorable, while it's still not going to happen month one or two, that the long term ROI, even if it is diminished from what paid, because of paid search, that the way people are looking at organic is, "Hey, I need cases anyway, I can get them. If I can get, you know, X number of cases a month, by paying an agency Y, I'm gonna judge it that way. Rather than there's something being, fairy dust is being sprinkled, and I'm hoping to get cases." What are your thoughts on that, you know? Have you seen a change as paid, not just, I'm sorry, not just TV, but paid search has gotten exponentially more expensive?
Casey Meraz
Yeah, absolutely. Cost prohibitive in a lot of markets, and, you know, especially for the newer guys starting out, or the people that don't have their firm built as a system yet with predictable revenue in cases being signed up. But yeah, I mean, the metric that you're talking about is really the only metric that I think, you know, law firm owners should be paying attention to. Because yeah, I mean, I remember a decade ago, when, you know, I had a client ranking for personal injury lawyer organically at that time, that was a national result, right? So it wasn't so localized. And that brought in, you know, their cost per case then was nothing. If they were looking at it that way back then it would have been, you know, $20 or something stupid. But yeah, I mean, now, that's a tremendous way to justify the efforts and, and really justify that spend. And I mean, that's so important, because everybody gets lost in these vanity metrics. "I'm not ranking for this keyword or that!" But a lot of times those people aren't even looking at their data to say, does this ranking, does me ranking for this keyword, has it generated any cases? Because at the end of the day, that's always what it's about, as you know, you know, better than most people.
Seth Price
No, no, absolutely. Look, there's always exceptions, like health of a site, there are things that you do. And this is sort of one of the things I go back and forth with law firm owners on, which is you'll see a drop in traffic, an algorithm will hit, and a blog that has been a stalwart, bringing 10,000 searches a month, disappears from search rankings. And while it's one of those things, it wasn't making any money, I love it from an SEO point of view. It is an ego hit when you see a number swing by that much. And so it's interesting. I'm constantly like, yes, you want to help the site, yes, you want those things, but like figuring out, as you were just saying, what is monetizable traffic versus what is ego traffic? And what is health of website traffic, but that's not generally what the law firms are focused on. They think, hey, that number there means something. In one sense, it is a great achievement to be able to get traffic to a highly competitive site regardless, but we both know that there are areas that if you put, you know, let's say there was a mass tort that's no longer being accepted by law firms. If you put a page on that, you're gonna have tremendous traffic to your firm, it's just not going to make you any money, and balancing out sort of the, the traffic number with what you're talking about, which is, hey, what's actually converting into cases?
Casey Meraz
Yeah, you know, you really hit the nail on the head there. That's something I was actually talking about today. Because, yeah, I mean, that vanity metric look, my traffic's going up month over month, I mean, 10,000, 30,000 visits a month. How many cases is that bringing you in? Is that, you know, really helping you? And if you remove some of that content, and your website traffic looks so low, has that actually affected your business? And the reason, and the deeper part of this is, it's... I was talking to somebody, again, recently, where I actually was encouraging, let's actually take your 3000 page website, and let's reduce it to like 200 pages. Your traffic is going to drop, that's going to look probably pretty bad. But you know what, you're going to rank really well for this very focused market that you actually care about, and you're gonna get, you know, 10 times the amount of case leads because you're just not so diluted. There's so many intricacies with SEO, and especially these old established websites where people have been blogging or doing this or that over the years. If you haven't maintained that, or you don't have a clear strategy today, you know, you can really be shooting yourself in the foot and hindering your performance by paying attention to traffic metrics, like traffic.
Seth Price
Now, it's funny you say that, because that's something we spent a lot of time on internally. We'd always been and we built a business on fresh content on a regular basis, feeding the beast. But I think there's a tipping point. You know, to me, 200 is not enough. But like at 1000, if you are trimming it, you know, if you are constantly going back and looking at those blogs you bought from some prior agency that were regurgitated news blogs, that hopefully those came off when you join the company, but really looking at what is mission critical, siloing content, that new copy, not having pages for the sake of pages, but those heavy websites, you know that, that's not going to, you know, that's not it, right? It's, it's, can you have highly valuable content. And I'm seeing much more of a focus on improving what's there. Because if you've been doing this for X number of years for a client, presumably if you're doing your job, you have most of the pages of content they should have for their topic. Now, the question is, can you upgrade that so that it's a better user experience and that you're giving the best information closer to the top rather than having people dig down to get it?
Casey Meraz
Yeah, and you know, to continue with that, I think you also touched on something that's important, is that a lot of people are concerned about creating more content when they may have already had this content that's just probably not even ranking anymore, maybe it used to. And so upgrading it, like you said, you know, making it better. But you can't really just say: I've written content, it was ranking at one point, and then forget it, because then it's just gonna slowly die. And it's not helping you.
Seth Price
Right, so really the tree or pruning analogy is a pretty significant one here. And it's actually been an interesting conversation we're having with more, with longer term clients, which is, hey, you know, if you're somebody with us the first year or two, there's still so much content that needs to be built out. But for legacy clients that have been at this game for 5, 10, 15 years or more, you can wake up one morning and say, "Hey, that, that number is really high, maybe it's too high." Yeah, I feel like you know, there's a number you want to compete with in more significant markets, and it's not that you want to like eliminate all of your pages, but you know, that, that, that extra fluff. Something I talk about a lot is when people onboard, triaging what's there into, you know, check plus, check, check minus. We've always looked at what are we getting rid of, what do we need to improve and what's great to stay. I feel like that's something that now needs to be done on a, on a periodic basis, because what was best practices four years ago, may not be, especially with some of the algorithm updates coming in. Maybe in our concluding time, would love to get your thoughts. We have two major pronouncements, Google tells us what they want to do. And in this case, they keep delaying the, with the, the finite time. But let's talk about the two sort of significant updates coming and your thoughts on how you'd like to see people positioned for them.
Casey Meraz
Yeah, so I mean, first of all, core web vitals, right? So, you know, I have a lot of different thoughts on that. And a lot of times Google says, "Hey, you got to do this." And they sort of force everybody to build the web the way, the way they want. But, you know, at the end of the day, I do agree with a lot of that. First, from a user experience perspective. You know, you look at a lot of law firm websites, you know, how notoriously slow loading some of these are. And I think it's important for attorneys to really think about that in dollars, because they could be losing, you know, if it's taking two or three seconds to load, how much money are you losing? How many cases are you losing? So there's that on one hand, so I do I feel like they need to push it. And then on the other hand, you know, they are pushing it pretty far, but I think that people should do it, because you do want to please Google. It's going to be a ranking signal, you know, it's going to have an impact on, on your visibility. We don't know how much yet, but...
Seth Price
Think of a few years ago, we thought that this idea of a non-secure site, we didn't even think twice about it. And now you know, it's like, hey, if you, if you, they've made it so, you know, they've said we want this secure, if you don't pay the 20 bucks and you don't secure it, like, it's going to show. And it's always amazing. I speak to like non-, friends who run a nonprofit, or even smaller law firms, and I'm always just like, you gotta be kidding me, like, pay the 20 bucks, get it secure and move on. And this is gonna be a lot more complicated. I think that the page speed, while I totally agree with you, it's a moving target. And that is, your website's a living, breathing... And on any given day, even the best SEO can have a site that's slower than they wish. But it's basically saying, "Hey, don't ignore that. Ignore this at your peril." It's no longer just something to talk about, but it's something that we're going to, we're looking at. I'm curious to know how much sort of give there'll be. Sort of like, you know, if a site, if a website is down for a period of time, you know, just Google, you know, will Google tank something, and historically, they've given you a fair bit of leeway. It's not like you're tanking if you're down for a limited period of time. Here, is it going to be one of those things where they're taking an average over a period of time, or is it going to be like, if a, it's a snapshot. If you screw up that snapshot? You're toast. Curious to see how it actually rolls out.
Casey Meraz
Yeah. For sure, I think it'll be you know, over a period of time, and then they'll evaluate that way. But, I mean, there's too many variables, like you said, it's a moving target. An attorney can upload blogs that they wrote or write a blog and then upload a photo, that was just, they took from their cell phone camera, and they didn't optimize it for the web, and now that page is screwed, you know. It's always going to be something that needs to be evaluated nonstop. It's not a one and done thing. So I think that's going to be the biggest problem for a lot of firms out there, as if, assuming this is has a big impact. So.
Seth Price
Absolutely. We'll conclude with mobile-first, you know, thought, thoughts on that. Something that, again, most of us have been, you know, it's been our DNA for a long time. But I, it's still, you know, we're still, some of us are still older school, and you sit there holding team meetings or client meetings on a desktop, and you're like, you know, at some point, they'll, they'll, they'll, we'll finally move. But that, Google saying, "Hey, guys, that ship has sailed. This is, this is where we want you focused."
Casey Meraz
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting one. Because I still have, you know, we have, most of our sites have moved to the mobile first index, but I have seen some that haven't. And it just, it's funny, because like, everybody is concerned, or a lot of firms have mobile websites, but there still are some that have the older mobile website versions, where it's not responsive, and they're using like an m., and things like that. That's really old school. I haven't really had to think about that in a couple of years but it was doing some research today on something and I came across one, and I just thought that was hilarious. And obviously, that means they're looking at the mobile version of your website first, so that's what needs to be important. But there's also some other issues that I think are more common with mobile-first, unresponsive. And that's when people are really thinking about their, their architecture of their website from the desktop version. And then they're coding their responsive, because they hired a developer, and then he's removing some links, right? And so Google's not even looking at, they're not really even seeing those links or taking them into consideration. So you're really messing yourself up. So, not to go on too much of a tangent there, but there's obviously still, there's a lot to be worked out there. And I wonder if that's why some of these sites haven't been moved over yet, because they're just, they haven't made any progress towards it.
Seth Price
Yeah, that's really interesting, yeah.
Casey Meraz
But I will say, I haven't seen too many non-mobile websites ranking anymore. I don't really even talk about it much anymore, which I was thinking about that today too, because I was recording a presentation on it, which I thought was funny.
Seth Price
Interesting I'll just, I'll conclude about it. You know, I remember it wasn't that many years ago, it wasn't nothing. There was a Google roadshow around the corner from my law office, and I went down, it was in like a little local Shakespeare Theatre, and they had rented it out. And they had all these different vendors. And remember, like, Dada, I think it was Dada, was an m., you know, partner of Google's, and they were sitting there at a Google event, pushing mobile-only websites, you know, what they should do as, as a, as a, you know, you should have your website and then an m. website. And it's just amazing how, you know, Google very often is, you know, tells you one thing, but they're sitting there with their sales team pushing it, and they're beautiful. Like, there's no doubt this was before apps were a big thing, and you know what, those m. websites were very clear for like a simple ecommerce platform site. Like you could do things that were amazing on them for the time. It is, it isn't, you know, as things have changed, you know, that is, that's one of the greatest frustrations we have as SEOs is, who will tell you to do something, and you have to figure out okay, do they really mean it? Or is this sort of like, "Hey, we want to say this publicly but we're going to get around to enforcing this later."
Casey Meraz
Yeah, exactly. No, and that's one of the annoying things. But you know, come to think of it, when Google does announce something, we typically jump on it right away. Because I'm thinking back to like, when they introduced authorship, and we jumped on that right away, and that was like a big win for like, a short period of time until everybody got on top of it. So there's...
Seth Price
I agree. And there, there, there are differences, right? There are things that, like, yeah, that's a no brainer, versus Amp, for example. Yeah, we struggled with it, some of my friends and mentors moved their entire groups over to it, we never did, we did not embrace Amp. I was at PubCon once and I was listening to like the leading panel, this was like the FU panel of people, and they had case studies of like four major national periodicals. And like only one out of four was benefited from it, because it was so freakin complicated to implement. And I'm like, if these geniuses who do nothing but Amp, they're Amp experts, can't get this right, they're getting one out of four, you know, clients of theirs effectively move there, what, why should? So again, like many things, I'm waiting to see what would happen. But that was sort of an example of like, hey, this looks really cool, but is it practically, is it practical for the world that we play it?
Casey Meraz
Exactly, yeah, no. And that's a good example, because I remember, we jumped on that too. And we did several sites. And we were like, umm, I'm not gonna like this very much. And then anyway.
Seth Price
There's a lot of, there was a lot of pressure, right? You were jumped out of there with... For sure, you want to be like, you never want to be behind the curve, you want to be the first guy. But, and that's where it's always, you know, think about it over the years, the number of people that have approached you at conferences and wanted to sell you geofencing. And finally, there are some great case studies slowly coming out, if you had invested in every one of these A-Holes that came up to you and sort of giving you their shtick, you know, very often they were failed yodel salespeople and then now selling this thing. It's, you know, it's a balance between making sure you protect your clients and you're ahead of the curve with something like authorship, while at the same time, making sure that you're not sinking them with some other bright, shiny object. And it definitely causes some sleepless nights as you're wrestling as to what is right for the, for a client.
Casey Meraz
No, that's true. And yeah, no, it's a big responsibility for us to figure that type of stuff out. But, man, that brings back memories too.
Seth Price
This has been really great, Casey, I really appreciate your time. And hopefully we get to meet at an in-person conference sooner rather than later as the world gets back to normal.
Casey Meraz
Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me, Seth. I appreciate it. Now you, make sure you have a great day.
Seth Price
Absolutely. Thanks so much. Thanks.
BluShark Digital
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