Beyond SEO: Adapting Law Firm Marketing for the AI Era with Chris Massaro

[0:00] Chris: A firm with horrible marketing but amazing intake is going to beat a firm that has great marketing and bad intake. That’s everything. If you dial in intake as a lawyer, with ROI in this industry you are going to be extremely, extremely successful.

[0:11 – 0:26 music]

The evolution of digital marketing for law firms

[0:26] Harry: Welcome to the Harry Handles It podcast. Today we’ve got the awesome Chris Massaro on from the Search Engine Guys, who is the CEO and leader of the company. Chris, welcome.

[0:36] Chris: Thank you for having me.

[0:37] Harry: Can you tell us a little bit about what the Search Engine Guys is all about, what your team does to help law firms, and give me a little background?

[0:45] Chris: Yeah, for sure. The Search Engine Guys has actually changed to just TSEG now. We’ve been around for 18 years. We’ve been doing it since all you had to do was SEO, and you’d show up straight on Google and get all the cases. Now, as everyone knows, it’s a million things in between. You’re figuring out different platforms, AI, and all kinds of craziness.

We changed to TSEG because for a while people were just calling us the SEO guys. We still do SEO, don’t get me wrong, but that’s just part of the business as a whole. Ultimately, we get lawyers cases. They tell us where to go and what kind of cases they want, and we figure out the best strategies to get them. We work alongside them to make sure they’re getting cases at a good cost, a good ROI, and clients at the end of the day.

[1:32] Harry: That’s awesome. So your company partners with law firms to boost their marketing efforts and ultimately get more clients. And you do this with a sole focus on digital now. SEO has evolved a lot since you started in 2008. Is digital marketing really where your company shines?

[1:50] Chris: Yeah, and luckily for us, that’s where the world has gone. Every single year, everything pushes more into digital, whether it’s AI now. That falls right on our plate. We do some non-digital strategies, but they’re still deployed digitally. We have relationships with influencers who advertise for us on their own platforms, and relationships with certain email providers, things like that. At the end of the day, it’s all e-communications across the internet. We’ve dabbled in OTT, which is probably the closest we’ve come to TV, but I wouldn’t say that’s our bread and butter.

[2:31] Harry: Talk to me about the evolution of what people thought digital marketing was for law firms. In the beginning, it was SEO. You’d have a nice website, some nice landing pages, you’d show up on page one, and that’s where all the cases were. Was that before PPC? Before LSA? Before everything else that’s been introduced into the market?

[2:48] Chris: Yeah, pretty much. You’d just put good content on your site, play the backlink game, and show up number one everywhere. Then Google said, let’s make this a little more fair, in their opinion, and shook everything up. So you have to chase what they want.

That was by design. Google wants the money. They make it so complicated that people pay them for ads, because why wouldn’t they? That’s been their thing for the last 18 years: shaking up Google every 10 seconds to make it hard on us. To me, that’s job security. But at the same time, they’re really pushing people into the pay-to-play game. I truly believe you have to do both now. You don’t want to do one or the other. Play all the platforms and steer your budget toward whatever has the best ROI.

ROI vs. cost per case: evaluating the right metrics

[3:34] Harry: Let’s talk about that. What’s your philosophy on how law firm owners should view marketing metrics? What’s the important metric you’d tell a managing partner? Is it cost per acquisition per case? Is it total marketing dollars spent versus ROI? What’s the most important thing to focus on when launching a campaign?

[3:54] Chris: It depends on the stage you’re at, but everything’s ROI. That’s the easiest and simplest thing to track. If you’re paying $5,000 for a case on one platform and $2,000 on another, you’d think, let’s go with the $2,000. But it’s not that simple in the legal space. That $5,000 case might return a $30,000 average fee, while the $2,000 case might return a $5,000 average fee.

Unfortunately, that’s what lawyers have done for a long time. They’ve chased the lowest cost per case. They’ve trusted lead generators who get cases who knows where. They’ve taken the risks and learned the lessons. But in the grand scheme of things, it always comes back to ROI. Most lawyers can tell within two months whether they have a really good case or a really bad one. There will always be surprises.

If I were talking to a brand-new lawyer asking how to track all this, I’d say: track your spend per platform. That’s key, and it’s easy to do. Surprisingly, people still say, “Oh, they found me on the internet.” That’s not the answer. Which ad? Which office did they call? Did they see you organically? You have to track all of that on the front end, and then everything else is easy.

If someone says they found you on a billboard and you don’t do billboards, obviously they didn’t find you that way. So what’s your next most logical guess? Do that analysis on the front end of where people actually found you, and everything else falls into place. Put a value on your cases after a month, then track cost per case against quality and see where your ROI is.

It’s a simple model, but it’s shocking how few lawyers actually do it. They keep chasing cost per case and don’t really know where their cases come from. They think it’s TV, they think it’s the internet, “they said this on the phone.” Don’t trust what anybody tells you over the phone about how they found you. You’ve seen it too many times: “Yeah, I saw you on TV,” and the lawyer doesn’t do any TV. You have to make your best guess on the front end. A lot of it is black and white; some of it you have to split. But if you track everything on the front end, everything else will fall into place. You just have to actually do the work and value the cases.

The reality of call attribution and tracking

[6:11] Harry: That’s a good point. One thing I struggled with when figuring out attribution: you do social media, you do this, you do that, and then you see organic conversions increase. Is that only SEO, or is it the other factors that lead people down the customer journey until they eventually click your website on Google? It’s tough. You can’t have 100% perfect attribution on every call. It’s not feasible.

[6:36] Chris: No, but you can get close.

[6:39] Harry: We have tracking numbers on every source, including the phone numbers people use on our ads.

[6:45] Chris: And that goes both ways. Just because they called the vanity number on your ads doesn’t mean they didn’t find you organically and call that number. It’s always a two-way street, so you make your best 80% educated guess.

The easiest approach is to add one thing at a time. Don’t start SEO and paid at the same time you start TV ads, because you won’t see what drove the impact. We had a client who did TV for two years. They were terrified of turning it off, but they were paying $200,000 a month and they sure weren’t getting that many cases. They finally pulled the plug, and we tracked what happened.

Your TV person will tell you it takes a few months before you really feel the pain, which is true. Your brand is carrying you. But after a couple of years, they didn’t really feel the pain; their cases didn’t drop off much. Vice versa: if you’re going to turn on TV, don’t change anything else, and see where the cases come from.

It’s not that only TV works or only digital works. It all works. It’s all about strategy: what’s working, how you’re doing it, and how you’re tracking it. You have to make educated guesses, but use common sense too. If you’re spending $2,000 a month on SEO and getting a thousand cases, or 50 cases a month, they’re not coming from SEO. They’re coming from your other stuff. Use your common sense.

Why your intake team must act as closers

[8:07] Harry: I love that. How many relationships have you had with law firms where you set up the campaigns, everything is working great, but you still get the calls saying, “Nothing’s working”? Then you dig deep and find it’s intake that’s not working, not the marketing.

[8:22] Chris: It’s 90%. Everyone’s got intake problems, and it’s not even their fault. It’s the hardest thing to do. “Intake” isn’t even the right word nowadays. It’s sales. You need closers: people who get on the phone and say why you’re such a great lawyer, why everybody hires you, why you have the best results.

People are calling and want to know one thing: are you going to get me the most money for my case? That’s all they care about. They’ll say a thousand different things, but it always comes back to that, and they want it fast, of course. If you don’t sell that way on the front end, they’ve already called five other lawyers. You could have shown up first. You could have paid for that lead. It’s gone.

A firm with horrible marketing but amazing intake is going to beat a firm with great marketing and bad intake. That’s everything. If you dial in intake as a lawyer, with ROI in this industry you are going to be extremely, extremely successful.

And it’s not a one-time thing, like “I did intake training, I’m good to go.” It’s every single month, every new hire. It’s monitoring every salesperson on the phone, setting strict goals, and monitoring them 24/7. Historically, lawyers have treated intake as a receptionist who can’t make decisions, doesn’t have much power, and has to go to a lawyer before signing anyone. That’s nonsense. The front end of your firm needs to be a closer: someone who knows your firm as well as you do, can sell it as well as you do, and can sign people up as well as you do. Otherwise you’ll just blame everyone else: it’s the marketing, it’s this, it’s that. That’s step one, in my opinion.

[9:55] Harry: I couldn’t agree with you more. I felt this on my own skin, figuring out how to grow. If we put more dollars in, are we just going to waste them because no one picks up the phone? What are we doing on the back end? Having systems and processes in place for what’s really a sales department is 100% key.

With the same spend, if you dial in intake, your processes, and your people, you’ll see signed cases go up. With the same spend, you’ve increased your ROI, your sign-up rate, everything, without spending a single additional marketing dollar. Until that formula works efficiently, it’s silly to spend more money on more leads to make the phone ring more when you can’t handle the baseline.

[10:38] Chris: Yeah, and it’s a tough conversation for us because everyone takes it as an excuse. It has been an excuse for marketing companies forever: “It’s not me, it’s you.” People take it very personally, and it’s been difficult for us to navigate. You can always improve both ways, the marketing and the intake.

But more often than not, when everything looks good, your rankings are great, nothing’s down, your leads look great, and all of a sudden the cases are gone, people didn’t stop getting into car accidents. People didn’t stop getting hurt. You need to look at intake, and it needs to be an every-month thing. The firms winning right now have the best intake. A lot of those are the big lead aggregators doing a lot of marketing with a dialed-in call center. Usually they’re referring to firms, and the firms accept those cases but pay referral fees out.

How AI and search engines are changing legal marketing

[11:35] Harry: That’s right. You pay for marketing one way or the other. Either you pay on the front end to get the cases and run the call center, or you pay on the back end with a referral fee. One way or another, marketing dollars are being spent.

Let’s talk about the advent of AI: AI Overviews, ChatGPT ads coming out. How do you see the strategy changing to show up competitively where consumer eyeballs are going? The range of places a law firm has to show up is increasing by the quarter: Google, Bing, Meta, TikTok, everywhere people are. How do you manage that, and what’s the best strategy to confidently tell a firm it’s playing in all arenas?

[12:23] Chris: It’s funny, because it’s flipped digital into more of a TV-type strategy. AI isn’t looking at one platform to figure out who the best lawyer is. It’s looking at everything: your reviews, what people are saying about you, your results.

We’ve shifted what SEO is. A lot of people call it GEO, or other made-up terms. For us, it’s “internet firm reputation management,” a term I just made up right now. We take a significant portion of the budget, call it an SEO budget, but it’s really a digital management budget. We pay people to write articles, do press releases, and get coverage on reputable sites, using our clients’ actual results or big things they’re doing in the community, and getting people on every platform to write about it.

It’s less about what you say about yourself on your website and more about what everyone else says about you. We’re seeing these LLMs value a settlement mentioned not on your own website but in Forbes or something like that. You can reverse engineer it: ask the AI, and you see the sources it pulls from.

It’s not just on-site anymore. People used to talk about on-site versus off-site; now it’s more than off-site. It’s working with the right people, writing about how great you are, and getting others to write about you too, including peer reviews from other attorneys. That’s not hard. Go to a conference, meet someone, and say, “You’re a great lawyer, I’d like to peer review you. If you could say something about me, that’d be great too.” It’s thinking outside the box. I say this now, and next month there’ll be something else to follow. It’s about keeping your ear to the ground and doing something before everyone else does it.

The pitfalls of fractional CMOs and vanity metrics

[14:21] Harry: And just because something worked or didn’t work in the past, the landscape changes so frequently now. You’re in a constant state of reassessment: where to put boots on the ground, where to shift resources, which agencies to partner with for which piece. With that said, can you tell our viewers the value of a law firm partnering with an agency to get that name recognition and those publications, and how that differs from what someone can do on their own?

[14:50] Chris: This has been a big thing for us recently, because fractional CMO companies are popping up left and right. Remember the finger-pointing game? That’s where everyone’s going. They hire a fractional CMO, who says everyone’s doing it wrong, then they go to a different agency, and another, and maybe the CMO is getting a back-end fee to recommend that agency. It’s made it even harder for lawyers to know who to partner with. Everything comes down to trust and transparency. Without that, you can’t let a company like ours do our job.

A good example: we had a very long relationship with a client. I still love them to death, but we had to part ways over exactly this. From day one it was, “Do your thing. Here’s your budget. I trust you. All we care about is results and cases.” Then they hired a fractional CMO, who came in asking: what backlinks are you getting, what traffic, I need this, I need that. Crazy micromanagement: we need X backlinks per month, X amount of this.

That may have worked 20 years ago, but it’s not what works now. You’ve given us a budget; our job is to get you cases with it, and it was working very well. The conversation shifted from results, and improving on results, to “I’ve been told you need this many backlinks and this much of that.” People are getting lost in it. At the end of the day, all that matters is cases. Who cares about traffic, impressions, or backlinks?

If I had a guy at Google I could call and say, “I’ll give you $100,000 a month to rank me number one for New York personal injury forever,” what would I care how? I’d get the cases and a heck of a lot better ROI than that cost. For some reason, the microscope has moved from results to output. I get why: companies have burned lawyers. That’s why it comes down to trust and results. If the cases and the trust are there, let the company do its thing.

I don’t know what next month’s plan will be until my SEO team comes to me and says, “We see this and this; here’s where we’re shifting budget, here’s the strategy.” That’s how you have to do it now. There’s no guide to SEO, and if there were, you wouldn’t do well, because everyone would follow it and you wouldn’t show up. Long tangent, but that’s a big shift I’ve seen in the past year that needs to be talked about in this industry.

[17:39] Harry: For sure. I bring it up because CMOs are becoming more prevalent and AI gives you information so much faster. The questions people ask are more information-based. If you focus only on metrics without understanding the full marketing picture, or how today’s SEO and internet-presence game works, it can be tough. There’s a lot of people in your ear telling you what should or shouldn’t be important.

[18:08] Chris: Unfortunately, that’s the managing partner’s job. A lot of them say, “I don’t know anything about marketing.” You don’t need to. All you need to know is cases and money going out. If your marketing company isn’t reporting the exact amount spent and the exact number of cases coming in, and you’re not verifying with your internal team that those cases came from those sources, you’re messing up.

You can’t say, “This guy sounds like he knows what he’s doing and he’s a CMO now, so I’ll give him the keys to the kingdom.” You’re shooting yourself in the foot. I get it, you want to be a lawyer, you probably want to be golfing right now. But it’s your money going out. You need to protect it, not let someone you met last month who talks a big game come in and start ripping things to shreds.

Integrating branding and digital ad strategies

[18:57] Harry: For sure. From an agency standpoint, how do you manage online marketing alongside a traditional branding play, if a firm is doing that? How do you keep the brand cohesive across all those platforms when there may be different agencies or marketing partners involved?

[19:16] Chris: That’s tough. It’s just communication. I have a couple of clients who are really good at this. Before they post anything on their socials or with other partners, it’s sent to us, and we do a blog or a page on the website so it all lines up.

If you’re using three companies, one for social, one for the website, one for paid, they all have to work together, and not in a finger-pointing way. They need to support each other. If you’re running a turkey giveaway and posting about it all over your socials and it’s going crazy, we need to build out part of your website to promote the same thing. It has to be done together, on the same page.

Open communication, and forced if you have to: “You need to get on the same page. This is the plan.” You should be having monthly meetings anyway. Bring everyone together and make sure you’re all saying the same things and moving in the right direction, because that’s more powerful.

Where to connect with TSEG

[20:18] Harry: 100%. Chris, this was an awesome conversation. Can you tell our viewers where they can find more information about you and your agency, and how they can get your help?

[20:26] Chris: For sure. Our website is tseg.com. Feel free to reach out to me directly at chris@tseg.com. Happy to get on a call and talk through everything you need. We also do a lot of case acquisition campaigns, so it’s not just the digital PI space. We’re doing more case acquisition by the day. Like we talked about, sometimes it performs better to run a campaign for certain cases than to chase them with SEO or build your whole website around them. It’s another big part of our business, so if you’re looking at either, feel free to reach out.

[21:03] Harry: Awesome. Thank you for being on. This was an awesome conversation, and I look forward to talking to you again.

[21:08] Chris: Thank you so much.

[21:09] Harry: See you, Chris.

[21:13 music out]