Seth & Conrad Saam: Take No Prisoners

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

Welcome to the SEO Insider. We are so pleased to have Conrad Saam here today. He is one of my favorite guys in the space. He got his cut his teeth at Avvo and is now the founder and CEO of Mockingbird. Welcome, Conrad.

Conrad Saam

Hey, Seth, thanks for having me. You know, you were one of the first like, there have always been people going to Legal Marketing plate things and playing that game. But it wasn't until I saw you at the kind of SEO nerd events where things got really real. I go, not only is legal bigger, but you know, there are a couple players in the game. They're taking it super seriously and you and I used to run into each other at like SMX, Moz. In fact, I've got my MozCon shirt, which MozCon 2014 I'm wearing it today. So, you know, it's now expected. When I started, I had to tell lawyers what SEO stood for. But like it's now expected, and you were one of the forefront, you were at the forefront of that.

Seth Price

Yeah, I appreciate that. It was a lot of fun. And one of those life moments when I would go to legal conferences, ones that we go to now, as agency owners, and I said, Hey, I don't want to get the stuff spoon fed to me. I want it from the firehose, you know got out to Vegas to those back rooms where, you know, you sort of learn the inner workings. But like I when I first met you, you were the Rockstar, because you were the cause celeb at Avvo. Tell me about that experience, like, you know, not only what it was like there, but in hindsight, knowing what you know, now, it just seems like such an incredible opportunity to see legal marketing from so many different perspectives.

Conrad Saam

Yeah, I mean, my first, you know, this goes back to 2006. And back in 2006, the number of people who really knew SEO was very limited. It was it was a small number, mostly Canadians, it was men and women, young and old, a lot of people made a ton of money, you know, peddling what we call the three P's porn, pill, and poker. And, and that was, you know, that was the ins and outs of what happened. And the cool thing for me was, I was able to get to a point where I had access to some of the best SEO minds, Like I got to work with Todd Friesen, I got to work with Vanessa Fox. There were there's a ton of people who knew their stuff in and out who weren't legally focused. But it was a really, really inviting open community. And I basically got tutored by the best of the best, you know, it sounds like I'm name dropping, and I don't mean to be, but it was just a very, very different a egalitarian group of nerdy people who helped each other it was awesome.

Seth Price

You know, getting to watch Mark's rise with with this incredible platform, seeing him in a little room in DC with 20 people yelling at him about what he was doing was unethical and wasn't going to work. You know, you're sitting there behind the scenes and said, Oh, user generated content. That's pretty cool. You know, combination of things that we're done talking about some of the things that, you know, that you got to test there or try out there. What were the things that you hit homeruns with when you were there, and what are the things that crashed and burned?

Conrad Saam

Yeah, I mean, the the obvious thing that was the homerun was link building. And I think at that point in time, the notion that link building was it was a job. Like, that was weird, but it was it was much more than a job. It was, you know, the key to everything. And it's still in many cases from an SEO perspective really is. But we were able, I mean, Avvo. I mean, the lawsuit was not unexpected, the first lawsuit, the outrage was not unexpected. Like it wasn't like Mark went in like an idiot. He knew this was going to happen. The the thing that Mark understood and the SEO strategists early on, understood about Avvo, was that that was all beneficial. Like there's no such thing as bad press. But there's also no such thing as a bet. Well, there is such thing as a bad link, but in this...

Seth Price

Look and there are bad lawsuits, but as long as it's curable. You know, like later on well, after you are gone, we're really the more sensitive lawsuits dealing with fee sharing before that, it was sort of like this nebulous advertising world which is going to work its way out. It's heading that way. Whether the state wants to believe it or not,

Conrad Saam

But all of that stuff like even like kick that bad lawsuit like the to ding dongs from I want to say St. Louis, that the gun toting lawyers with the protesters. Right, their backlink profiles awesome now.

Seth Price

Exactly, no, no. In fact, one lawyer that I know who's done better than most, you know, had a huge cyber attack against him. He lived through it. Not enough of it was discounted by Google. It wasn't penalized. You know, history is written by the victors.

Conrad Saam

Yeah. So I mean, that very much happened. You know, so Avvo went along the link building we were we killed it. I mean, we were so much better at link building and and associating PR to link building, then this is going to come across as super arrogant, which I am arrogant. But in this case, I'm not being arrogant. It was just everyone else was so bad, right? They will.

Seth Price

But not only were you doing stuff, and not only was it a real thing that was cutting edge and getting real national press, right, you didn't have the link build, it was literally you might have to call up and get the link. But these articles were being written left and right. Talk to me a little bit about sort of just the use of the badge. That's something that other people have caught on to since but it seems like you guys pioneer that?

Conrad Saam

Well, we certainly pioneered it in legal I'll tell you because I built and designed the badge. There were you know, there actually, I don't know if it still looks like this. But there are actually two links in the badge. And the first link. Well, the first link goes to the lawyers profile and it takes up the majority of the space in that badge. And it goes to that lawyers profile. And the downside for lawyers. And this happens all the time, I still see this, you put the badge on your site, you stop paying, Avvo now all of a sudden, you're sending people from your own website to your Avvo profile, where your competitors advertise on your own name. And you sent them to that advertisement, which is banana boat crazy, stupid, but like that still happens. But the second link there, I'm sure you don't know all the elements of this. The second link went to the search results page for what you do. So if you're...

Seth Price

It blew me, that's one of the reasons my mind were self made badges that didn't have the links in them. Because...

Conrad Saam

Here's the piece that you don't know. We were able when we created that bat, so sorry, let me explain the story to the listeners. And then I'll tell you what we did to manipulate it further. That link goes to like, you know, the car accident, right the page,

Seth Price

Right, the page that's competing with you in the SERPs for your for your results.

Conrad Saam

That key page. So that SERP page on auto, so that was that was a big deal. We did a ton of work on that. But the you could actually change the anchor text dynamically for that link on the badges because it was a call to our servers. So I could then test out different anchor texts on that badge that no one ever saw, right? And we could cycle that anchor text and we could...

Seth Price

No, what I'm saying is those in the know, we'll just create a graphic that looks exactly what going up, which is what you would advise me to do if you know. So but look, I got to think that half the valuation may have been that move that that was one of those things that created a juggernaut that you know, was able to like that put you up there. Over the years, we kept hearing algorithms search, we want better and better results, you would think that you would want a lawyer result over a directory, especially.

Conrad Saam

It's an interesting facet from Google, right. Like it's an interesting play that they made. And I have probably for 10 years been wrong about my answer to this question. And the question is, does Google not want so many search results showing up in the pay, in the results that are directories? And yet they clearly do, right? They clearly want more search results showing up.

Seth Price

Or that they just haven't tweaked the algorithm. One thing that everybody whenever I complain about things like local. Or the other option I always had was that if they were ever worried about about antitrust, is that one of those areas that they were trying to give a tip of the hat to other people so that they wouldn't loiter to the place where you'd see the most of that action. Was this one of these to be more, hey, we were making our money. Now let these guys make theirs.

Conrad Saam

Yeah. And so I mean, there's a possibility, but like, I mean, you've seen this over time. Four to six, seven of the results are directories. And so a couple of things happened for me with that directory is clearly can out link build everybody, law firms. So the fact that there's not 10 directories, right suggest that Google is deliberately going to show some level of diversity in those results.

Seth Price

Or to be fair, it's generally the f.u. directories you don't generally see ones that are there by happenstance. It's generally the top few directories.

Conrad Saam

Yeah so to me, it looks like for directories, they rely heavily on backlink algo. And for non-direct, and because there are things that are not directly showing up, they have to rely on other signals there. Right? So they're looking for different types of business. But again, like I remain flummoxed, frustrated, annoyed by the fact that, you know, a, SEO is kind of now at the very, very bottom and b you're probably going to look at three to five law firms showing up in those for the head terms, tops. And that sucks and it's just me and I keep saying that it's gonna change. And I've been wrong forever. So like...

Seth Price

But as you know, when you put your heart and soul into it for your clients, you're able to be in that mix. To me, that's the home run DC, like my pride and joy of criminal when we're above the directories. I know that, hey, I'm doing something right. And that that's one of those great, you know, that's how you sort of can tell that you're doing SEO at a pretty elite level?

Conrad Saam

Correct.And those you know, it's, if you can compete with the resources that I had while I was at auto, you're doing pretty well, right.

Seth Price

Well, talk to me about what were some of the things you tried there that didn't work that you said, hey, I can't imagine this wouldn't work. But you know, were there things. You were on such a platform?

Conrad Saam

Oh, no, I wasn't uniquely genius. I will tell you something that I thought would suck that didn't, that I was that I fought tooth and nail and I was completely wrong on. That was the answers product Q&A. So we call that at the time, I spent a ton like a ton of time, optimizing for the phrase free legal advice, right. And I own free legal advice for like, four years at Avvo. And that did a couple of things. One, it generated a ton of inbound content. And two, it generated a ton of engagement and a ton of business for lawyers. And if you had told me that lawyers would take the time to answer questions on the directory like Avvo, and generate business from doing so I was dead set against it. And I was totally wrong. I don't know the numbers here. But there was a time when I mean, if you look at the traffic that went into Avvo it started out with name search, right? It was really, really heavily on name search. And I did a lot of work to optimize, I know more about name search than than anyone ever should. And then when this this Q&A thing came out, it turned into this question and answer directory where we had more content about the law that was well SEO optimized than pretty much anywhere else, because we were relying on user generated content, and it just exploded. And it got to a point where the volume the number of pages became not just unmanageable, but it had a negative SEO impact, because, and I this is, I don't know how off color your podcast is. So just apologies for where we're going on this. If you have sensitive ears, give me 30 seconds. The most common that we ran into this big problem where people were asking the same questions, and and the question that happened. I mean, we had hundreds of 1000s of pages that looked like this. I'm 18, my girlfriend's 16, can we have sex, right, like, over and over and over again. And so what you end up happening with there is tons of very, very thin content, like 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of pages of very thin content. So we had to go through this curation product project where we were actually minimizing the number of pages instead of growing the number of pages.

Seth Price

Well, it's sort of what you're seeing now with like Facebook groups where somebody joins the group and ask that question to name your affinity group, I see it all over the place where there's this problem where you don't want to be oh, that's the same question again, and it comes back through it. One of the things I felt like, in one sense, it was ideal timing, the blog phenomenon was sort of peaking. And people were looking for something that wasn't as much of a buy in as a lawyer as creating the blog ready to write long form content, but could create, connect directly with people. And so for all the people that weren't willing to geek out on a blog platform, this became, oh, I don't need to, you know, didn't call it this. I don't have to SEO my own site. But if I answer something well, here, you know, in my spare time, I'm able to add value that's going to that's going to bring me business and it worked.

Conrad Saam

Yeah, I mean, so the reality is, I mean, a blog is, it's just content on the web. You could, basically, as a lawyer, leverage Avvo's SEO strength by publishing that content on the Avvo site, as opposed to your own blog. Exactly. And so it really was an interesting time where I mean, this got bananas, we were getting lawyers. I don't know if you know this, but we had lawyers paying us to get access to the questions an hour before anyone else did. That was part of the model. I think I may get the details roughly right. But I believe one of the things that we did with Avvo Pro is you got the question, you got like, Mary submits a question on auto about car accidents in Sheboygan, you're a car similar in Sheboygan, you get the email about that question an hour before everyone else does. Right? If you're I think it was when we did Avvo Prime, but like, it was bananas, and people were making tons of money and they were doing really, really well on this right. The people who adopted Avvo early made out like bandits and the people who hated it, hated it.

Seth Price

Right. And then over time, they said, Hey, we got to make some money from it. And it you sort of started to see while there was some value still in the Q&A. It wasn't like there was none You know, this is sort of during the time, then some got worse after you left, but it became much more of a pay to play service.

Conrad Saam

Well, I mean, Avvo was venture capital back, they sold nicely. I'm personally happy about that. I'm kind of sad to see where they've gone since that happened. But the, you know, they were looking to monetize. And it's, at some point in time, I suspect lots of businesses get to this inflection point where you let the money supersede the value. And you have to be very, very careful about that. And...

Seth Price

It happens in every industry friend of mine on ZocDoc's, he was getting appointments for 50 bucks a pop, next thing, you know, it's 300. You know, there's that deal. It's like, like anything else, it'll it'll balance out to a market rate at some point?

Conrad Saam

Well, usually, right. So supply and demand being what they are, it makes the potentially fallacious assumption, especially with lawyers, that you guys are making rational decisions. And that's not always the case. And the dumbest example of that. And I think you guys have been, like you live in a win loss world, you went to school, where you're graded on a curve, everyone wants to be at the top, and being at the top of Google ads is very, very expensive. And if you, in order to do that, effectively, your cost per client becomes so bad or so expensive, that you have to have what I will call the Walmart of legal where you're a volume producer, and efficient because the cost of acquiring that client is so high, and you can't therefore do some types of law that you otherwise would.

Seth Price

Well, look, that's why I think both of us love the SEO space, and other digital marketing, like Pay Per Click because you're able to get returns and not be at the whim of those venture capitalists. Now Google is, pick your poison, right, venture capitalists or Google? You know it, neither are great. But the thing that historically has been great about SEO is that you're just we're able to get eyeballs at prices that you know, $1,000 CPM is not something that is a great place to be.

Conrad Saam

Right. And I mean, where we're going with this conversation, Seth is, too few attorneys have a good sophisticated handling of their costs, right? There's lots of software out there to try and help you do that. There's the lawyers know, they should try and figure this out. They don't trust any of the vendors, right. And the vendors by and large, have earned that lack of trusts. They've worked. We've worked really hard as an industry, Seth, to destroy any perspective of trust that you might have with us. And so it's....

Seth Price

It's funny, you say that, because that was what people said to me when I was morphing from no lawyer alone into digital agency owner and lawyer was that how are you going to differentiate yourself from all that? And that's, that's sort of like been the I look at you the same way, like, everything you have to do is to show hey, I'm not this, this is what's here, I'm adding the transparency, we make a lot less money or multiples are not as good. But we're able to provide value in a way that at scale, venture back is just much, much harder to do.

Conrad Saam

Well, I think that yeah, I mean, if we were venture back, where we're looking at, if you have an eight, if you have a business, or at least an agency that's objective is to maximize profit within a timeframe. You are screwing your clients, I said it to clients all the time, right. Like, as, as soon as I sign a, as soon as you sign a long term contract with me, right? Like I maximize my profit by doing as little for you as possible. The key for me, where this becomes difficult, especially in the legal agency world right now, is there's so much garbage out there. And lawyers are spending so much money on so much crap. I mean, the the amount of, and where the crap is coming from is it's just kind of exploded in terms of the level of sophistication among people who call themselves and this is, I said earlier, I'm arrogant, right? So this is gonna come across as super arrogant, but the level of sophistication of people who consider themselves to be experts is just absolutely mind blowing. Right? It's just, it's terrible. And so there are a lot of lawyers wasting a lot of money, on a lot of people who have no business doing what they're doing.

Seth Price

Well, you know, talk to me, why, why Livabo it seemed like a pretty cool place. You're top of the top of the world. Everything's going well, I remember when you made the move. It was kind of like, oh, well, what was the thought process there?

Conrad Saam

This is a really cutesy MBA answer but I also mean it. I went, when I was doing although we did a lot of education. We were doing social media marketing, before that was actually like called a thing. But it was all around educating, sharing how SEO works, what it is, what email marketing is, like how to do it, what can spam is like all of these, like what you and I would now consider kind of basic fundamentals. We we marketed or I marketed auto heavily by pushing that education to lawyers, and I loved it. I you know, me I like, I'm, there's nothing this sounds super twisted. And when I said out loud, there's nothing that makes me happier professional than standing in front of a bunch of lawyers and talking about what we do.

Seth Price

Well, and I've seen you I've seen you get on a red eye, get up, get off the red eye, give a speech, have a beer and get back on the plane to go home. Yeah, there's nobody who is who's sort of like Seattle, you plotted yourself in the country for legal marketing. It couldn't be a less convenient spot in the continent.

Conrad Saam

But it's, you know, it's what I like, I get it, I love it. But so to answer your question, we got too big for that. Right. And I tried to do things that were really focused around, educating and teaching lawyers, I also so, I'm an immigrant. My old man started a business here. My wife runs a business here, I run a business here. I can trace entrepreneurial-ness back through my my family. And I love the enterprise, right. I love the enterprising individual. I love helping people. I love small businesses winning. You know, I just wrote my holiday card. And one of my lines in there is like, why is our stock market booming while small businesses are closing? Right? That's that is systemically not right. So I love these. These aren't enterprising entrepreneurial, growth oriented people who happened to be lawyers.

Seth Price

And I feel you because that first conference back in Seattle at that low, that was I still goes down. And Mark goes, because I remind them every time as one of the greatest conferences ever held, are people inside of like Google and Bing search there, they didn't send their ad sales guys. You had, you know, Justia, there you had Tim giving, like one of the greatest sort of keynotes of what was going on in the state, there was more knowledge being shared. And I cried a number of years later, when I would go and it was like, it was sale of how to leverage your profile.

Conrad Saam

And it was, and it was just at conference was like, so that was my, again, I'm going to come across as arrogant. That was my my thing. My idea. My my whole positioning for Avvo in the legal community was around thought leadership of online marketing. And that conference was awesome.

Seth Price

And it was, sadly, I mean, again, part of its evolved, and it had you had sales people involved, but this was purely, you know, at a time when you there was it was the intersection of SEO or digital and legal marketing. It was sort of that that apex at the point where you were like, you are actually getting to people who are showing you inside how things were done.

Conrad Saam

Yeah, I that was a great conference. And you're right to speak. Tim Stanley's SEO talk, like blew my mind. But it was things like that were like, I wish all of the crap that lawyers get exposed to and advertise to on on Facebook and everywhere and every single conference they go to like it is become such a perverted prostituted pay for play game, that it's really hard for lawyer to actually learn something of value.

Seth Price

So what should What does a lawyer do? You're getting constantly inundated with, you know, but whether it's online, or whether how does a lawyer sift through that, I mean, you can find your trusted relationship. But...

Conrad Saam

I think the key here, the really this is gonna sound very counterintuitive to everything I just said, you need to move away from trying to understand the nuances of the marketing, unless you're really, really into it. Unless you're really deeply nerdy. Unless you want to talk about H ones and canonicals and SAP and all that stuff, which I do but like, I don't think most lawyers should. I think what a lawyer should do is run their own reporting, accurately review it, and don't get kind of bamboozled by the stuff that we tell you that we're doing because we try and make ourselves look good now. And you know, this running your own business, like you. Let me go back to Avvo I'll pick on Avvo. Avvo would tell you about the number of searches that they had for what you do. But what they really meant was page views. Right? Different things. Let me give you another example. This is a very common example that agencies do all the time. And it's disgusting. We will report to you, the lawyer that we generated 27 phone calls for you last year, last month, right. And so we'll report on these things. And we'll tell you how things are going. But we're using we're counting every single phone call to you, even though our reporting infrastructure, we can just count the first time callers, right. But we know that our job is to try and make you look make us look good. So you'll continue to spend money with us. And the lawyers left at the end of the day, the end of the month, being like dammit, I got 52 phone calls, according to this agency. And yet, here I am businesses down again.

Seth Price

Well look, the good news is the technology has caught up to that things like CallRail, it's pretty easy to tell what's what within reason. Again...

Conrad Saam

My point is the lawyers should learn to tell what's what.

Seth Price

if you just listen to your CallRail, that would be half of it.

Conrad Saam

If you listen to your call rail, if you know how to report if you know what, what's what's coming in, if you have an honest, accurate and efficient assessment of that, you don't need to know what nap is. You don't need to get into vagaries of LSAs or local or this out of the other thing. And you don't get bamboozled by people like me.

Seth Price

Right. But look, there are people I would argue that there too, you know, yes, of course, you won't be bamboozled. You pick a horse and you're running with it, you should obviously trust but verify to quote Mr. Reagan. That said to me, one of the things that I you know, that has become harder and harder. And that Avvo, I think wrote a very long wave on is you don't always know where stuff is coming from. People are doing searches, they may see your website, they may get to Avvo, they see you there, they saw you in the paid search, even though they may or may not have clicked on it. And that that little community that you've created of showing where you are, what I loved is when people got to our intake and said, Oh, yeah, you're everywhere. That's to me. So, you know, that's one of those things that it's so freakin hard to measure. You know, when you look at some of the juggernauts that are in the space, remember, John Morgan didn't use tracking numbers, he has one gold number that he loved. And, you know, he's like, look, I don't know where the money is coming from, but it's working in all different directions. To me, you got to be careful, because you can track really well a lot of stuff. But you can also then throttle and not that you should ignore it, you need to take that into account. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said. But there, you can, I think almost over track in the sense that if you're putting, you know, if you're putting those different, you know, I call throwing spaghetti at the wall fishing lines, whatever your analogy is, if you're doing all of that, and it's coming back together, that is something that's almost impossible to fully track.

Conrad Saam

Well, so here's so I've come full circle on this. There are you and I could sit down and talk about multi what's called multi touch attribution modeling, right, which basically says, someone's seen my ads here. They've seen my, my billboards there, they've heard me on TV, they did SEO searches, they did a they did a click on a Google Ads thing. And finally, they called me from an LSA. Now, there are different models, you have first touch attribution, which is I'm going to track the first time someone connected with me, you have last touch attribution, which means I'm gonna give all the credit to the last one. My personal is the 40, 20, 40, where you get 40 to the first 40. The second they split all the rest of it up in the middle. Here's the thing that is always wrong. It is always 100% wrong. So why the hell go through the process of doing that? It is just NBA garbage. That doesn't work. So I really have come full circle on this where I was trying to come up with these modeling things and these these different attribution models. We started working with HubSpot, because it does a great job of actually pulling everything together. And you can apply these different there's a U model and a V model. There's also the models. And they're all wrong. Right. So ultimately, I brought him this guy recently named Matt Moore. He used to run Internet online marketing for Sears. He's now working with me, and Mockingbird. And what he said was, when he went to Sears, he eventually realized it actually is a very, very blunt instrument. All of our revenue, all of our marketing costs, now we know our customers, right? And the reality is that is the case, there are some things that are linear, right? There are some things where it's like the LSAs, for example, you have a need you look for that need, you make a call, you hire that attorney. There are some things that are more linear, there's some things that are less linear, obviously, billboards are much less linear. But overall, getting a feel for your cost per client. Is it going up? Is it going down and a John Morgan who's spending, you know, $1000s and $1000s, hundreds of $1000s millions of dollars on television. They're not tracking this down to the channel. They're just not...

Seth Price

So some of the smaller players can and do. You know, but I would argue that it's just as going to your point, even if you could get it it's a short term number compared to I think I saw you out at SMX Chicago, like, a decade ago. And I remember there was a keynote speaker from Google. And he was talking about, like Carnival Cruise and the number of touches before somebody booked. And I was like, oh, no, that's not the case leaders calling it which to ascertain if that was true, then, but I am now finding so many more touches and start and stops, where we are not even pretending to have the resources to the person who searches at night. And then the next morning at work, resumes the search, you know, the chat that came in the night before and the phone call comes in the next morning? It is it is definitely you know, and the fact that you have the phone and the iPad at night, that people really are, you know, it is getting harder and harder. And I keep pushing more and more towards that. Because look as agencies, we would get unlike, so in one sense, you're afraid about agencies that oversell what they're doing. I think it's often you could be underselling what you're doing as an agency, because there are all these extra touches that you're putting together.

Conrad Saam

And you're exactly right. One of the things that you miss, if you took if you were to take my MBA answer is like, Oh, well, because I can't touch we used to say like, if you can't measure it, why the hell would you do it? Well, that's actually really, really short sighted thing, because we all know, intuitively and if you look at the marketing literature, you know this, empirically, that the more you touch, like if you see if you see 68 ads for a whopper, you're more likely to buy a whopper. If you see one you're not, right. So we know this, this is not new, it's not new, it's not new data. It's not new theory. But because we can't tie four or five or six of those impressions of the Whopper back to buying a Whopper, we're not going to do it that stupid it is it is it is a miss the branding side of this, I used to be really anti branding. And I'm really coming around to that because the value of the brand name becomes really, really important. And then you have like what was just like, like utterly dulled branding, but the value of keeping that name in front of clients, so that you I mean, you know, I bet you I bet you do this really well at Price Benowitz. You continue to stay in touch with past clients. Right. Why?

Seth Price

Because I mean, it's a whole nother conversation about you know, that that the referrals have always been that's a truism. That's true that...

Conrad Saam

But how do you stay in touch with them?

Seth Price

We email we call we do everything we can.

Conrad Saam

And it's branding, right? You're not You're not saying hey, did you get in?

Seth Price

Oh, no, no, no, no, it's just, keeping on top of my socials and everything else.

Conrad Saam

Don't forget who I am. And and you try and model that. Good luck. Right? Good luck, it doesn't work.

Seth Price

Very cool. I want to pivot for a minute. So you see, you leave Avvo you're now you're now on your own, you got Mockingbird, and you're taking on the world, you have very vocally sort of taken on some of the biggest players in the space. You know, my opinion, rightly so. There are a lot of people out there that are selling things that when we look as an SEO and I look under the hood, at what some of these larger proprietary CMS is are running, it's just it's crazy. They're people selling SEO without content and links, there's you see these things over and over again. Talk I mean, to me, I am you know, we always say you should do what you enjoy, you clearly enjoy this and are very good at pointing out the hypocrisy in these areas. Talk to me about this adventure you've been on and some of the sort of the, the ups and downs you've had with that.

Conrad Saam

Yeah, so I mean, this, this goes back to my Avvo days. And part of the reason I went out on my own and run to run this agency was I was just so sick and tired of watching people get screwed. The gross, was probably not even the grossest example. But one of the grossest examples was, you know, when when you would get a company that would would register the domain to themselves? Right? So okay, I'm FindLaw, I'm going to set you up with your website, but I'm going to register to myself and then I'm going to contractually make sure that the content on that belongs to me, right? Like, you're you're now renting a website, you're renting your own website, which can then be turned around and sold back to you any better. Right. And I remember I don't know if you will, I'm sure you do. They had the Google authorship, right. They were selling previous I don't know if it was FindLaw. So let me be clear while I'm bashing people. There was a big firm. I can't go back to my memory back remember exactly who but who was selling the previously established authorship and then just changing the name. It was bananas. It was crazy. So there's all sorts of ways I published a guy called the fine of the escape find law guide book to escape FindLaw. I watched that. And I watched with Google Analytics, like Minnesota just blew up. Eagan, Minnesota, which is where the Fila headquarters are, and I was good Getting like 300 people at a minute at a time looking at my site, I was like, oh boy. But the reality is they didn't have their clients best interests at heart. They just didn't.

Seth Price

But I also as an agency owner, the thing that I thought when I came, oh, we'll just we'll clean house, everybody from FindLaw will want to escape. And I'm amazed, forget about the the proprietary stuff for a second, I'm amazed at just how well some of those larger groups have done at sort of a combination of different elements, but keeping people in doing things that are not actually in their best interest.

Conrad Saam

Well, listen, this is a this is a relationship business, right? That you mentioned me get on the plane, pre-COVID I'm traveling three or four times a month, right? And I'm meeting with people and it's a relationship business. The model for finalize, you know, you they've got people distributed all around the country who are in law firm offices all the time taking you out to lunch, if you've got a personal relationship, and you've heard this too, I'm sure, hey, my FindLaw, I don't love FindLaw, but boy, you know, Jason...

Seth Price

It's unbelievable. And they paid them really well.

Conrad Saam

Because I like because, you know, we go with steak with Jason, you know, once once a quarter, and maybe we do this or we do that. And like, you know, it's Findlaw. So like, they've been around for a while, but good lord. And I like your lawyers for God's sake. Right.

Seth Price

But I think all these these larger corporate groups, and some of them were small, became larger. It was partially the getting in the door to lower dollar, getting the relationship and just adding things on top. That it was again, I have been amazed at how people relationship or otherwise, lack of wanting to change in early so that any benefit of getting early was a good thing no matter what. But it is one of those things that I am always amazed at the the sort of reluctance to leave those hives, especially when you see the actual numbers behind it.

Conrad Saam

Well, I mean, you mentioned seeing the actual numbers behind it. I think one of the ways that the big box providers keep their clients around is they don't show them the actual numbers behind it. So if you are a client of an agency that won't let you see your Google Ad spend, you are crazy. So let me give a very simple way that agencies screw their clients, I can bid on Price Benowitz. Right, which would probably cost me $3 a click, or I could bid on Car Accident Lawyer DC, which will probably cost me $93 A click if you don't have access to that data. I can pass off my $3 Click to you for $93 Car Accident Lawyer. Right. And I'm not lying to you.

Seth Price

I lived it. I somehow got a hold. I did a test. $500 dollars behind yodel back in the day, they were bidding on stuff like Star of David, for my partner, David Benowitz. I mean, I you looked at it, and you were just like and forget about the fact that, you know, to me, and I think I think you gave me these words of advice a long time ago when those guys were coming up the reach locals in the yodels, which was if they're not going to tell you what their ad spend is right, Google AdWords as you know, we could talk about that for an entire two hours is so competitive. And there's, you know, once you're playing in the, you know, in a, you know, out when you're in the big leagues, right? You go the basics, right, you got your quality score, and you've got your negative keywords, and you have your campaign setup. Well, the margin is not great enough that if you were to give away half your ad spend that you could make that up with technology. I just don't buy that. And so that when it, points was the question was what could be more than that. So when they have this black box, I'm gonna give you money and you'll tell me what I'll get to me. Like, you know, I think it was you who said this, it's like, you could go out and investigate. It's easier said than done, because these people don't really exist. But at the time we thought they did, you could find the number one AdWord guy in the world, and he probably charge you 20%. Now the world's changed and those guys were that good don't touch smaller campaigns, but back in the day they did. So it was one of those weird moments where you're just like, I don't care how amazing you are. If you're charging me over 25 cents on the dollar, something's not right.

Conrad Saam

Well, I mean, that's where like, especially at volume. Right.

Seth Price

Absolutely good. Micro level, I'm taking that off, because so much of it is just you know, you can only do so much there's a cost to setting up a campaign at the very basic level. But after you're out of that when you're spending 5, 10, $15,000 a month, there's absolutely no reason for that.

Conrad Saam

Well, and here's the thing, this is where this gets insanely gross and nefarious and why I like, this is a very self promotional concept, but it works for BluShark as well. If you have a client if you have an agency that is working for the guy across the street in a pay per click echo system, and they will not let you into that echo system. How do you know? What are they doing? And my bias. And I say this because if you if you go go look on zip recruiter or something like that go look for for Scorpion data scientist or Internet brands data scientists, these large big box providers are hiring data scientists and what happened Seth, this is gross, they optimized for the system, as opposed to the client. So they are looking at data across everything. And I'm not saying it's not effective, it's amazingly effective. But if they're running data across everyone, they are paying the they are playing for the highest paid client, right. And they're optimizing for their system as opposed to for their individual clients. And I think and the reason we know this, is because they won't let you in behind your to see what they're doing in Google Ads. And that is crazy.

Seth Price

Is it's a fascinating world. And, you know, one of those things that, you know, when you get that sales pitch from these larger organizations, if you know, if you're number 8 of 10, in a market, like who's fighting for you? Do they have different sales reps that sit in their own silos? And are you bidding against each other?

Conrad Saam

No, it's and they don't write. And by the way, I'm not maligning their abilities. They're great. They have very, very smart people, they're looking at tons of data they're optimizing. Do they have, you have to ask yourself? Do they have your best interests at heart? And the answer to that is? I don't know. I really don't know. You know, I'll give you a list. So you've got Scorpion, big provider, FindLaw big provider Internet brands, which has now picked up a whole bunch of different sub brands, including Avvo, another big provider, they're looking at the data game, as opposed to their individual clients. And that just should give every single person pause.

Seth Price

Very interesting. So what, what what excites you? What are the things out there right now, if you're if you're a law firm, what are the things that you'd be sort of saying, hey, you got to double down on this.

Conrad Saam

So obviously, the LSAs, which also come across as Google screen, it's a pain in the butt goes pink...

Seth Price

Do you think the Google screen will ever drop into the three pack, the Mac pack, as a way of sort of getting rid of the filter of the...

Conrad Saam

well, it's an interesting, so that's that there's a there are many nuances to that question that you just asked. And I will tell you, I mistakenly had a perspective of Google screen when it started. I thought that's exactly what it was there for. They're determining whether or not you actually can practice law, right? Whether or not you have insurance, if you're actually a lawyer, which has been like absolutely perverting local search results. And so I initially, when they rolled this out, I thought it was it was to make sure that they're actually firmed in local, they have said very explicitly that it's not. And that that little green checkbox very explicitly, not only does it not show up if you've run out of your budget, but it won't show up anywhere outside of that Google screen. And so the answer is, so that's part one of my answer, part two, my answer is, if you look, there is now a hook between the two. Okay, so Google now knows in your Google My Business listing whether or not you are actually licensed to practice law in that area. So it would be very easy to improve the results to ensure that only people who actually had a lottery showed up in the local results for legal, it would be very easy. Having said that, I don't think it's going to happen. And here's why. Google goes out of their way to separate church and state paid and non paid. And so I don't see them perverting that. I don't see them changing that anytime soon.

Seth Price

Well, you know, again, what we'll move back to this in a moment. But one of the things that I've talked to a lot of guests on the show about is, you know, the fact that Google has such a debacle with low with the local search with a three pack where spam is so pervasive, you've fought it for years, you've written about it. And we've had joy and others on here talking about it. I have yet to get a good answer. You know, other than they're making so much money, they don't care. Google smart enough. They had spam and organic years ago, Matt Cutts figured out how to cut it out you don't you don't mess around with it. You can still do it, but you're gonna get slapped eventually. What is you know, what do you see here because it is getting worse. Not better. There's been articles written about it, which is normally the turning point. Normally the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, expose, on something eyeglass store world changes, the mugshots article, big article world change, we're not seeing that here. They they could put a minimum of three reviews they could do something to the local algorithm just nothing has happened.

Conrad Saam

Yeah, so the minimum of three reviews won't work because reviews are a bunch of bullshit.

Seth Price

No but a minimum of reviews so that again right now that's that's a that is a very small hurdle to jump if you're trying to it is but it's not nothing. And right now that's most of the spam or abuse. Worse listings we're seeing are not playing that game. But fortunately mentioned.

Conrad Saam

I will tell you what I know about Google and legal and this does not come from Google. It comes from outside of Google. You want you did you watch the Clio? Clio conference. You see their big integration announcement with Clio Grow, right? Gives Clio a huge leg up. Right huge leg up. Basically, you can you can book appointments directly through Clio Grow in your GMB profile, and you can manage your GMB profile through Clio grow, right? Big deal, massive, massive. They spent a lot of time digging deep into legal when they rolled out the, so they're getting deep into Clio. When they rolled out the LSAS. They got deep they I mean, Google went and talk to and dealt with state bars to find out what the requirements are for to be a licensed lawyer at the state level.

Seth Price

Although ironically, my cohost on Max Growth Live, Jay Ruane, he couldn't get his either got couldn't get it up or got taken down. Google was using the voluntary bar, not the actual required bar as it is so it's not perfect. They did it well. They were making the phone calls. They were trying..

Conrad Saam

I mean, they have individual requirements for that. Now, if you also go deeper into the LSAs, look at how they have LSAs categorized, there are all sorts of categories, florists beauticians, blabbity, blabbity, blah, the only category, the only industry that's broken out by in our term practice area is legal. They're not looking at, different flavors where there's real money involved. There's huge money there. So my point being Seth, Google is getting i If you asked me two years ago, I and I still say that in many cases, Google looks at and treats. Lawyers like restaurants, they think of you guys as a restaurant, right? But, I think that has changed in the last nine months. Well, I think they've known that there's no cash or they just haven't gone into it.

Seth Price

But then what good luck given all of that, and the user experience so your LSAs, you're getting, you're double dipping, right? You had your LSAs, you got your paid, you have this one piece of real estate super valuable. It's, you know, why would you allow spam to permeate, like the most featured part of your page, even if you I know, you want to get your clicks up top to make money. But if people come and see crap, like, again, it's not like they forced everybody else out. So it's not like there's, here's somebody else is gonna come in and do it.

Conrad Saam

They're not actually, so go back to the user. This is a super cynical answer, go back to the user experience. Okay, I look for a car accident lawyer, Oklahoma, I click on a link in local, because it's important to me that someone's local, they've got a bunch of good ish reviews. So I'm like, Okay, I click on the link, I get to pay a site that looks like an attorney website, I fill out a form or I pick up the phone that a really nice person takes into my information now, in the background, that then gets sold to like seven different law firms at as much as whomever will will purchase it. And like that gets kind of filtered into the results. But ultimately, might I don't even I might not even know, I probably don't know that I've clicked on what's not actually a real business. And so you're not getting this big outcry. You're just not.

Seth Price

So, like, we could talk about this for forever. So I think that, you know, in the interest of not going too long, I think we're gonna have to have you back to continue this conversation. Because you and I, you know, we've, if they weren't recording for this, we'll probably talk for another two or three hours. But I appreciate I've over the years love your enthusiasm. I've seen you speak probably three dozen times, but I still sit there and take notes and learn stuff. So I you have made the journey of legal marketing that much more fun and exciting and the fact that you're willing to take on some of these behemoths and really poke it legitimately. So, you know, I come with this conservative law school background where I'm just like, leave me alone, but I admire it and I feel that like the industry is better for you having done that.

Conrad Saam

Well to come back full circle, you know, I one of my early jobs at Avvo. I took the angriest calls when the when we had this customer service woman she's a great lady named Kristen but when she was like, I can't deal with this now. I got those calls. Right? And honestly, it was in a really sick twisted way, I really enjoyed it. And, you know, I kind of understand where it's appropriate to poke and once where it's appropriate to push back and like, I'm not going to be bullied, right? I'm just not going to be bullied. And that has, I think my going back again, full circle going back that training of talking to angry lawyers for like four years, right? My profile, you know, I got yelled out on a bus by someone because I had an Avvo shirt on, right. Turn that into a rational conversation like that's, that was. I liked it. It's twisted. Yeah.

Seth Price

But you know, it's something that they did. Well, you know, Josh King's role there. And the fact that this was the one place that when something crazy hit your profile, they'd actually write the person back and say, hey, are you sure you meant this? That's all you want. As a lawyer, you just wanna make sure it's not a bot. It's not like it's not your client who's off their meds who's fine the next day. And that to me the fact that that original core team with Mark, you, Josh, and others, you know, put so much thought I think that's one of the reasons it was so successful and took off is that it was a community.

Conrad Saam

Right. No, it was I mean, we did again, I mentioned this earlier, we were doing social media marketing before it was a thing right. And it works and it really does work.

Seth Price

Well, to be continued. We're gonna definitely have to have you back on here and continue this conversation because I have loved it.

Conrad Saam

I will. I will dig up if you want to have me back. I will dig up my old Avvo soccer team t-shirt. We'll put that on that. Still fits which is a stretch.

Seth Price

So I will not say goodbye but I will say to be continued.

Conrad Saam

Thanks Seth.

Seth Price

Be good.

BluShark Digital

Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital as well.