211: Click. Call. Convert. Client. Jay Berkowitz on Turning Google PPC and LSA Clicks Into Signed Law Firm Clients

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 Golden Rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time zone or whatever time you're watching this. If you're watching the recording or if you're watching live, welcome to 10 Golden Rules live monthly event. And today we're going to talk about how to get those naggling little Google clicks, and not only how to get the clicks, but how to get people to call, how to get people to convert, and how to create clients from Google. And what's the state of Google today? So let's get into it. So click call convert client. That's what we're here to talk about, and we're

talking about the paid clicks today. So, how to rank in the top three new bid and testing strategies that have come up, and what's the cutting edge strategies for conversion? How do you go from clicks to calls to convert to clients? Right. Obviously, that's the name. So, we're going to talk about two areas. We're going to talk about pay per click, the paid ads on Google. We're going to show you some real examples. So this is a live current campaign. Client spent $19,000, which their ads were shown 147,000 times. 4000 clicks. Click through rate is 3% So from 4000 clicks, we got 74 leads, and

leads are normally defined as calls, chats, or forms. So we got a click. The person either clicked to call, or they clicked and chatted, or they clicked and filled out a form. Cost per lead $262, signed 16 clients at a cost of $1,200. So we'll go through this this metrics in a lot more detail, but that's a live pay-per-click campaign, July 2026, and people are asking like, does pay-per-click work? Does it still work? We got a bunch of examples to show you it works, and then we'll break down the campaigns, and we'll show you you know what are some of the more details that we look at when

we review these with clients. And next up, the LSAs, the Google Screen Local Service Ads, and we're going to talk about how you actually get to the top of the screen, and the difference between LSAs and PPC, and why we love these? Because these are typically calls or messages, and what really matters. What's going on right now? Well, there's for the most part, and Google changes this up all the time. They're showing three LSAs on the phones and two on the desktop, which is kind of a flip flop from where they were. And then people ask me all the time, do the LSAs really work? You know, we had

them running; they were doing okay, and then they didn't work. I mean, this is a client who is spending. You know, they were spending 18 or $20,000, then they were spending $33,000, and they're signing from 15 cases to 30 cases. But this really works. I mean, if you're in personal injury, obviously it's very different in other practice areas. It costs a lot less for the clicks, and it costs a lot less to acquire a client in family law, in criminal law, in estate law, and we have this thing working all across the country. And I'd say for about eight out of 10 of our clients, it works. But

the net net here is is here's the spend, here's the leads, here's the signed cases, and this client is averaging a $1,300 cost per signed case. So yes, it really works, and it really works all across the country. But it only works about 80% of the time when you do everything right. And we're going to talk about our secret algorithm for the LSAs, how you do everything right, and then we're also going to spend a little bit of time talking about the changing environment. So Google is now showing AI overviews, which is the artificial intelligence search results. I'm sure everyone's familiar

with this now, and how is this affecting the Google environment and the pay-per-click environment? Last thing, we got a great case study where we did a website redesign for Jeff McDonald, and we went from 467 calls a year later to 1,290 calls, and a really significant improvement by redesigning the website to focus on calls.

Quick benefit here, if you if you want to get some of the details that we're sharing today, and if you want to share this with your marketing team, you can just scan this now, or you can go to tengoldenrules.com/hottrends. So, who am I, and why why am I qualified to teach you and talk a little bit about pay per click and LSAs? My name is Jay Berkowitz. Founded our company called 10 Golden Rules 23 years ago when I wrote the 10 Golden Rules of Online Marketing Workbook and the 10 Golden Rules of Online Marketing presentation. I spoke at the Direct Marketing Association, and five or six

people came up to me and said, "Jay, you know we you got to help us with this Google thing. We hear it's going to be big. So for the last 23 years, I've been teaching people about internet marketing. These two books became Amazon bestsellers, and my new book, Advanced Internet Marketing for Law Firms. We put all of these recordings up on our YouTube channel. We've had 1.3 million views on the YouTube channel. Some of the top videos have been viewed over 90,000 times. So if you want to learn about SEO or social media, or EOS for law firms, or annual business strategy. Our annual business

strategy had crazy like 48,000 views. I think this one. So great content available on our YouTube channel, and we work with clients. I mean, the reason we do these and the reason we share a lot of free value is because we're looking to do business with law firms. We do marketing, internet marketing for law firms, and we work with some great folks all across the country and all across the continent. Actually, so without further ado, click call, convert client is today's topic. First, I just want to explain about the logic of paid advertising, and I want to go all the way back to the

early 1900s. And John Wanamaker was one of the most famous quotes of all time about paid advertising. He said, "I know half my advertising's wasted. I just don't know which half. And when I started out in the marketing advertising business, I worked at an ad agency for McDonald's restaurants, and then I went on to be the director of marketing for McDonald's restaurants. And we would do all this advertising, and I can tell you from a lot of experience, advertising worked, but we didn't know exactly which part of the advertising worked. So, for example, I worked as the director of marketing at

McDonald's restaurants, and I worked for the ad agency for McDonald's restaurants. And when we did an ad for something like this, this is a an example of McDonald's Happy Meal. When we put the new Happy Meal ads up on Thursday night, and the billboards went up, and the radio ad started, the TV ad started, by Friday after school and and all weekend, we would break last year's records for sales if we had a great Happy Meal like a Disney Happy Meal or or a McDonald's Toys Happy. So, advertising worked. Like I can tell you 1,000% over and over in my career for Coca Cola, for McDonald's, for

Sprint, and for all of our lawyer clients, advertising works. But the hard part is figuring out what works and why I made the switch from traditional advertising with TV and billboards, where we didn't know exactly how much the TV contributed to the billboards or the radio. In digital, we know to the penny how the advertising works. So first off, I'm going to talk about the local service ads because these are the little ads right at the top of the screen. I'm sure everybody's familiar with them now. If if you're a lawyer and if you're doing any marketing at all, and the beauty of these

ads is that they generate pay per lead, not pay per click. So down here is a Google ad, a traditional pay per click, and someone's going to click over to your website. But we love the LSAs because they're going to click and they're going to call you, and you're going to get 100% leads, or they're going to message you. We'll talk a little bit about that as well.

Now I mentioned a minute ago on the phones, you know, the vast majority of people are going to call you, but I think the numbers are up to about 20% of people like to chat. Now here's an interesting fact: people who like to chat, you should continue to chat with them. And at such a time as they decide they want to get on the phone, our old mindset might have been when they start chatting, immediately want to call them. But the the current mindset and the best practice is people who like to chat. Sometimes they don't want to call. You know, their kids are there, they're at work. You

know, different things like that. So, so you want to, you know, meet them where they are, right? So, if they if they want to do a message chat, you should chat. If they want to do a call, you should call, and you can give them the option to call. So, the beauty of these, like 60 or 70% of searches for law firms for across most of our clients are going to be on on a cell phone. So the searches are done on a cell phone, and they can just click to call right there. And that's the beauty of these LSAs. Now it's the same thing on a desktop, but not everybody has you know WhatsApp or some calling

feature enabled on their computer, and so they're more likely to click and message and start start talking with you. And the the strategy here is we want to get to the top of the page, and and the LSAs are so great because everybody says, Jay, how can I get to the very top of Google? Well, the the local service ads. Are at the very top of Google. So, the people who tell me like you know we tried the local service ads, they didn't work or they weren't that great or Google didn't give me enough credits. I would argue that if you run these programs right, we're going to show you how to run

them correctly. It's the only way you can really get to the top of Google. Like if you're not participating in this program, you don't have a chance to be right at the very top of Google. So, what do you need to do? Like, what are the what is our secret algorithm for the Google Local Service Ads? The first thing is, and and how do you get to the very top of the page? The first thing is you got to answer the phone within 15 seconds. You know, let's let's go back here and think about it from Google's perspective. If Google is going to put you right at the top of the page, actually above Morgan

and Morgan, and who do we have here? Darren Stewart, very top of the page. You have to be super responsive because Google's not going to put you up there if you don't answer the phone. Google's not going to put you up there if you don't give them feedback on how good the calls were. Google's not going to put you at the very top of the page if you don't if you miss calls on a regular basis, because Google wants the Google experience to be good for the consumer, they want the Google experience to be good for you as an advertiser. And if you don't answer the phone, you're not going to have

success with this program. You're going to cancel out of this program. So the algorithm is built for Google to succeed, for their clients to succeed, for their consumers to get a good experience. So it's there's no evil intent by Google, but you got to answer the phone like a demon within 15 seconds or three rings, and you can't miss any calls. I said it's like a time bomb, right? Next thing is you can't have any answering machines. The LSA program, and I would argue all of Google's programs now, are listening to how effectively the consumer experience goes when they refer someone to your

website. So think about it: when someone clicks on an ad, when someone clicks on a PPC ad, when someone clicks on Maps, when someone clicks over your website and calls you, Google has so much analytics and there's call run, all these tracking softwares.

There's very high likelihood that Google is tracking your performance. And again, they're not doing it in a malicious way. They're going to send people to websites that are responsive to consumers, because at the end of the day, that's what Google searches for: is to help people out, not to send people to websites and phone numbers where people don't pick up the phone. So you can't send an LSA ad to an answering machine and have a high degree of performance. You can't have phone trees. Like press one if you're an existing client. Press two if you're a new client. Press three if you're

calling from a medical service provider. That goes into your 15 seconds, and Google sees that as being unresponsive. So when somebody clicks on one of these ads, let's go back here to the ad. When someone clicks over here to call, you want to make sure you pick up the phone and you pick up the phone like a demon. And on the message leads, it's also very important that you have an automated message responder. And we recommend like Juvo leads and Intaker. There are a couple companies that will manage your message leads for you with automated chat, and they've built integrations into

Google so that you can get the result. Like my friend David Eltingham, where you see he typically replies in a few minutes because we got David to set up with one of these instant messaging services. But you don't want to be the option that typically replies in a day. First of all, so it's unlikely you're going to show up on the top of the page anymore, and obviously you want to be you you want to respond instantaneously, and you also want to show Google that you're responding. So I mentioned intaker and Duval leads are both folks that can manage your chat within seconds. They can respond to

the consumer. Now, in terms of bidding, you want to set your bidding mode to maximize leads, and then the amount you're going to bid. Like, don't set the average weekly budget at some crazy amount. If you're in a small market and you're relatively small agency, you know you can't set it to like $100,000 a week. And the other thing is, Google's going to do a silent ping of your of your credit card, and if you set your your weekly budget to $100,000, that means you're telling Google, "I want to spend 400,000 a month. First of all, it's unrealistic; it's not going to happen for a single location

law firm. Secondly, if the silent ping on the credit card doesn't say you're accepted for $400,000, like if you don't have an Amex Black card, Google's going to say, "Hey, I can't give this person 100,000 a month, 400,000 a month. So it's it's going to it's going to set the algorithm off in a negative way. Next thing, you've got to designate all the leads immediately in the back end of the Google algorithm. So now they have a rating system. You can rate all the calls from one to five, and then you want to give them a bunch of feedback. Okay, this was a great case. mrs. Hernandez was in

an accident. She's treating with the chiropractor, and she's going to the the neck doctor. And we're going to help her get her medical covered and get her car repairs paid for. And you want to give them put a lot of text in there that with information about. Accidents or family law, criminal law, like whatever your category is, get those keywords in there. I'm using PI personal injury as the example today, but it's just as relevant for any business with LSAs, Google reviews. So our Google reps have told us that that the algorithm is looking for one to two new reviews per week per

location. This is a tool called Bird Eye. You could use, or you can just send out a link. After you resolve a case, send out a link and follow up with the consumers. Make sure that they give you get your Google reviews. You don't need hundreds and hundreds to succeed in the local service ad program. You need one to two Google reviews per week. Another approach that's working really well is the multi-location strategy.

So we're coaching most of our clients to get a second location and a third location. Morgan and Morgan, obviously the nation's largest advertiser, they have six different locations just in Orlando. Now on the surface, that doesn't make any sense. Morgan Morgan has a big head office in a big building somewhere in Orlando. Why would they need multiple locations, right? But the logical answer is for the local service ads and the Google Maps. Those algorithms also include proximity, how close you are on your cell phone or how close you are on your desktop to the location, so the more

locations, the better for this program. Now, another thing that we hear all the time is "Help! I've fallen! I can't get back up, which is a reference to a really old TV commercial. Most of you probably don't get that, but a lot of people tell me we were in the top two, we were in the top three, and we've fallen out, and we just can't get back up there. So we have a bunch of methodologies that we can help you get back up into the LSAs. Short version: one of them is completely resetting the account. Number two is opening it up and opening up to more categories. So there's the headlines

on the local service ads. How do you get to the very top of the page? Now let's talk about pay per click. Now, pay per click. I always think of it as sort a little bit of a volume. If you're, I want every client to do really well in the local service ads. And my analogy is Google has a pie. They're going to give you a very small slice of the pie. They're going to give everybody a chance. They're going to send some leads your way when you when you get approved for the Google Screen program and you get signed on. And there's only a few things you need to do. You got to connect your your Google

Maps, like your Google Business Profile. You've got to get approved. You've got to provide them some insurance. It's not that bad anymore. Used to be a much more onerous process to get screened or approved. If you have a current law license, nine times out of 10, it's relatively easy to get approved. You need a simple headshot with no background, submit pictures and things like that. So if you get it in the local service ads program, my my take on is Google's going to give you a slice of pie. If you're in a small market and you're in a relatively small practice and you've got a single

location, you know Google's going to give you four or five calls in the first month. They're going to give you 10 or 12 in the second month if you answer the phone, if you don't miss any calls, and if you give them feedback by dispositioning the calls in the system. Now the pay per click is a little different. The pay per click very very good if you're again small market, small practice area, not as competitive as pay per click as as personal injury. If you're in a big market and you're in personal injury, now you're competing with the big boys, and you're really got to spend a lot in order to

make it work, but you can test it. You know, there's no everything in digital marketing is is a good strategy to test. So here's one of our large clients in a large competitive market, and let's go through the numbers. They spent $34,000. These are all monthly numbers. Okay, we typically we we look at monthly chunks because if you look at a week, generally weeks can go up and down. A month generally stabilizes things, and if we look at month over month and we look at same month a year ago in terms of the comparison, that gives us a good data point. So these guys spent $34,000. This is a

big advertiser. They got 249,000 impressions. They got 6000 clicks, so 6000 opportunities that are calls, forms, or chats. Or sorry, sorry, clicks. The clicks are just the clicks. I'm confusing conversions. They got 244 conversions, so 6000 clicks. So either they clicked to call or they clicked over to the website. That's a 2.5% click through rate.

Very standard in the industry is a one to 2% click through rate. This campaign's doing really well. The cost of a click is $5, 552, and then 244 people became leads. That's what Google calls conversion. So that's what I was talking about calls. A call is a lead, or what Google calls a conversion. A fill out of a form. They go to your website. They fill out the form. That's a conversion, or they do a chat with you on the form, or they do like an LSA type of chat, right? So Google calls those conversions. So we're down a little bit on our percentage conversions. We're down on the cost

per lead, which is really good, and our paid cases-we had 24 paid cases for this client. The cost to sign a personal injury case in a large competitive market, $1,432. This client's very happy with 1400. Not very-they'd be happier with $1,200, but $1,400-they're going to make this. This client makes on average 15,000 a case in revenue to the firm, so 1400 is well within our target cost per acquisition. Let's look at another campaign. This is a client spending $19,000 in a month, 147,000 impressions. Their click through rate 3% so a little bit higher, even better performance. Their cost

per click a little bit lower. They got 74 leads or conversions. Same data point: calls, chats, and forms. The cost per lead 262. They had 16 signed cases, so 16 clients actually signed up. These guys are coming in around $1,200. A little bit less. A little less competitive market, a little bit better bottom line performance. Okay, now what do we look at in terms of the details? Like when we go into details with the client, again we're going to look at the impressions, the clicks, the click through rate, the cost per click, the cost of the campaign, how many conversions, and the cost for

those leads and the conversion, and then we can break that down by the different campaigns. We can even break it down by the keywords and the ads. So when we're looking at the performance of the campaign, which keywords are driving clicks, conversions like phone calls, chats, and forms, and which ones are actually driving signups to actual clients. So what you can do is you can constantly refine these campaigns using the data, using the knowledge to make them more and more successful over time. So here's an example of some of the ads and the different ads. When we break it down, the

different ads have a different cost per conversion. So we can constantly rewrite our ads to make them more like the higher performing ads, and get rid of the ads that cost more on a cost per conversion basis. So when you're setting up your Google campaign, you're going to go to ads.google.com. You're going to set up your campaign, give it a daily budget, give it a. You can do geo targeting. So I'm here in in Boca Raton. So I might tell Google, here's the zip codes I want to target, or I could tell it go go 10 miles or five miles from my location. I give it a monthly max

budget, which is actually just populated off the daily budget. You can also pick day parts I mentioned here. So we typically like to go 24/7 with these products, and you should have after hours answering. Seems like Google rewards you for doing that, but on the pay per click is different from the LSAs. On the pay per click, you might want to constrict yourself. Like you're going to get the most opportunities in personal injury, not necessarily the case in every single practice area, but a lot of calls come in on Mondays. For some reason, you know, people don't call law firms on Saturday

and Sunday. They don't assume they're there or they're doing other things. So Mondays are great. So you might want to go like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday if you're constricting your campaign, and go nine to five. So if you want to have more ads in a more targeted time period, you can target different day parts when you set up the campaign.

Then you want to be super clean, and what I mean by that is you're going to put all your car accident or accident lawyers keywords in in one ad group, and then you're going to have ads that talk about you know being auto accident lawyers, and then you're going to go to a landing page. Is specific if you're clicking to a page, you want as many calls as possible. We'll talk about that as well. But if you are going to a landing page, you would have a auto accident landing page. Now, when you're setting up keywords, there's a thing called match types, and this is getting more specific. But you know,

if your agency ever asks you, or here's a good question to ask your agents: What match types do you use? Do you use broad match or do you use broad match modifier? So basically, what this is saying is that if I use broad match and the keywords women's hats. I could get a search for things like buy ladies hats, which is you know different. Google's using a synonym for the word women's. They're using related searches and relevant variations. If I go broad match modifier with a keyword women's and hats, the. Person, the keyword the person searches always has to have women's and hats. Very close

variations, but no synonyms. Phrase match is exactly the keyword, so women's hats, but it can include buy. So it's always got to have women's hats, and then exact match. And we're saying only show our ad when someone searches "women's hats, an exact term very close, and then negative match. You may say, "I never want the term women, and an example is I'm selling baseball hats for you know men, and we don't have women's hats or whatever. We don't have small sizes. Maybe that's a bad example. Okay, the anatomy of an ad. So we typically two parts to this ad: the headline and the description, and

then there's some other things you can do. So Google allows you to do extensions. So like if you connect your Google Maps, you can have a location extension. If you connect the call extension, you can have a phone number. You can have site links extension. So these go to specific pages on your website with different practice areas that these guys do. We talked earlier about landing pages. So again, auto accident campaign is going to go to the auto accident page, or you can you know you can go to the homepage. But generally, you're going to get much better results if you know the auto accidents

come to the auto accidents page, and the specific examples come to the specific pages. This is an example of a nursing home abuse page. So, for you know, the difference is obviously the ads are going to talk about nursing home abuse. We're going to go to a nursing home abuse page, and then something very important: when people do fill out the form. You've got to have a thank you page. So this is a small thing, but the tracking code. So when someone fills out the form, then the tracking code on the thank you page is going to tell Google this person did a conversion. So it works a little bit

better. All the pages should work really well in mobile, and this is like super important. Everything you're doing and all the analysis and everything I talked about earlier, we're tracking conversions. We're reporting. We're measuring. We're improving. We're testing to improve our number of conversions and reduce our cost per conversion. So it's not about clicks; it's about conversions and setting up the Google campaign. And then, on the whole, how many of those conversions-calls, forms, and chats-how many of those turned into actual signed cases? Now, super valuable, super

important. Again, we put call tracking on all of our campaigns. So generally, we use something called CallRail, or there's what converts, and Google actually has call tracking. You know, they're recording the calls on the LSAs, and I suggested earlier they're probably listening to all the calls anyways. So the diff there was a big difference in phone call conversion versus form fill conversion, and actually, if we go back to these landing pages, I've taken most of the forms off of our client pages, so this is not what I would recommend for the design.

Most of the times, we want to say like, call for a free consultation, call for a free consultation. We want the chat or the call. First things first, we want to call. Typically, the calls are going to convert better. If you get someone on the phone, you can get about 24% of those people to sign on as a client. Whereas, if they fill out the form, it could be as low as 2% because a lot of times when they fill out the form and you call them back, if you don't call them immediately, they even forget they filled out a form on which site? We we talked about the chat having the live chat on the

website in taker or Juvo leads. Now let me go into a few advanced strategies, some of the more sophisticated things. So one thing you can do is you can connect your Google Maps, so you're going to enable Google Maps to show search ads, so these are pretty cool. This is what we call the Google Maps result. So here's a search. Here's a couple Google ads. Here's the Google Maps with the red dots matching to the locations. 99% of consumers don't realize this is an ad. So Google always shows three results in the map pack they call it the three pack, but they sometimes slide an ad in there, and

so the average consumer has no idea that you paid to be there. So that tends to be a pretty good position. Another strategy we like is called remarketing. So let's say someone goes to my friend Scott Silver's website, and Scott's securities attorney, and then we can run an ad when they're doing their Yahoo Finance for this securities attorney business. So let us attempt to recover your losses. Fortunately, there haven't been many losses in the last five or six years in the stock market. So let me talk a little bit. More about the design that I recommend today. So this is a redesign we did

for Jeff McDonald's website, nice and clean, consistent with his TV advertising. And before we had a massive form on the page. After we took the form off, there's still a form at the very bottom of the the page. If you scroll down, if people want to fill out forms there for them, but what works a lot better, as you see here, it says just call Jeff, call and the phone number call 24/7 and the phone number. So people look for the phone number in that top right position, and the call to action here is phone as opposed to call to action fill out the form. So what that did is we went from 467

calls to 1,290 calls, and we see the forms went down a little bit. The forms are the yellow. The forms actually went down a lot, but we got a lot more calls and we got a lot more signed clients. I also promised to talk a little bit about the AI overviews, the Google AI search results. So, what's the state of the union here? Well, first of all, Google is still the game, and the game is still played at Google, even though ChatGPT has done phenomenally well, and Claude. Everyone's talking about Claude and Perplexity, and Grok and all the other local LLMs, large language models, or the AI

search tools. Google is still 90% of all searches. So please don't get too distracted if someone's telling you you've got to figure out how to rank on Chat GPT. I mean, I I would argue that you've got to figure out how to rank on Google because Google's serves way more of these AI results by like 10x than the number two guy, which is probably ChatGPT today. So when you get these results, there's a show more result, and you have an opportunity to contribute. If your website answers the questions, how do I choose a car accident attorney? See, we we see there's a paid ad here. Then these are AI

results. Now, for the most part, Google is showing these early on in what I call the cycle of search. So, if you're just in an accident, you're just trying to figure out like who's going to pay for my car repairs, who's going to pay for my hospital bills.

When you just do that first search, like how do I choose a car accident, do I need a car accident attorney. If I was hit by an Uber, and Google's going to show an answer. They're going to try and help you out and give you an answer, and they're going to use their AI to give you an answer so that you don't go to ChatGPT or Claude to look for an answer. So it's super cool. If you help answer questions, you're going to show up here, and also these little links. Most people don't realize these are actually linking out to the web page Google used to compile this answer. So you can do SEO.

Here's our our client Jeff McDonald again. Jeff's SEO AI SEO is working really well because he's helping answer that question and helping Google. Talked earlier about the the power of voice searches and answering questions because essentially we've learned that and Google's built their algorithm so much better that they now can answer a question. Like in the old days, if you said, you know, do I need a car accident attorney if I was hit by an Uber and it wasn't my fault? And does Uber have insurance to pay for it? Like, you know, if you ask a long question like that of Siri, Alexa, Google

Voice, right? They all now have voice capability. If you did that five years ago, Google would be completely confused. You had to be very simple, like you just had to put in car accident attorney, and sometimes Google would give you like Morgan and Morgan in Orlando and someone in New York. So then you would refine your search. You put car accident attorney Boca Raton Florida, and if you gave it a very descriptive search, you got a really good answer. But now Google Google thinks about okay what exactly is this person looking if they're searching for car accident attorney and they're in Boca

Raton I'm going to show them car accident attorneys in Boca Raton so because we now ask questions in the form of a sentence and Google knows how to answer those questions we can reverse engineer our algorithm to put questions onto our websites and onto YouTube. So here's an example of an attorney answering questions: What happens if I get hit by an Uber or Lyft? We take the YouTube video, and Google owns YouTube, and YouTube's still the number two website in the world. A lot of people doing searches on YouTube, so we put the video with the question as the title, and lots of keyword

description terms, including the question, so that we're doing search engine optimization for a question. And what we're doing is we're reverse engineering because we want to show up here as the website that helped Google and. The question. So we're doing these videos. We're putting them on the website, and we're also using them in the socials and putting them on Google Maps. Super valuable. So how do you get found in these AI answers? You cover topics comprehensively. You put frequently asked questions on the website. You build links to your website. You build your local community brand,

local links, and publish on a regular basis, so you become a known entity or expert to Google. So those are some of the tools you can use to come up in the AI search. So, anyways, that covers LSAs, pay per click, and a little bit about the new AI search results. Now, I've got a whole webinar on how to get listed in those AI searches and the ChatGPT searches. So, if you're interested in that, can just find that on the YouTube. So, with that, I'm going to take some questions, and hopefully, you all have some great questions. Okay, we don't have that much of a budget. How can we get started?

Perhaps just LSAs. Yeah, definitely. If you don't have a large budget, I recommend the LSAs over the pay per click. One of the challenges with pay per click. Now it's very different. If you're in estate planning, family law, criminal, we do security stuff. If you're in any of those other niches, you can definitely do pay per click, and sometimes it's better. One of our clients does sex abuse cases where they represent the victims and the victims' families.

The local service ads don't have a category for that. They have a category for people who've been charged with sex abuse crimes, but they don't actually represent the victims. I keep telling them like this is bogus, guys. You know, you're helping the bad guys find lawyers, which is their right, but you're not helping the families of the victims. But so some categories don't have LSAs, but for most of the categories, I would recommend the LSAs, and then in the ones for the victims of sex abuse, you have to do pickbooks. You can't do LSAs. I was looking at another category. Oh yeah, aviation. One

of our attorneys is one of the top aviation experts in the country, and so he does aviation. So in general, I recommend starting with the local service. Number one, it's at the very top of the page. Number two, you're paying for leads, not clicks. Number three, a lot of times clicks go to your website, and only 10% of those people actually call you or fill out the form or do a chat. So it's much more valuable to do LSAs because you're getting calls or in some instances messages, but they're 100% leads. It's not 10% leads if they click to your website. Similar question: If I have a limited

budget, where would you put your money today? LSAs, PPC, or SEO? I would do LSAs and SEO, and I would do the question and the answer SEO you talked about. So make a list of the questions you get asked most frequently. I just did an exercise where I actually downloaded recordings of my last 200 phone calls, and I asked Claude and ChatGPT. I did it both. I asked, I downloaded the transcripts of the phone calls, and I said, "What are the 50 questions we get asked most frequently? And I'm turning that into SEO content, so there's a pretty cool idea. Another similar question: I have a limited

marketing budget. How much should I allocate to PPC versus LSA? So I think we answered that. If you're auditing a law firm's Google Ads account for the first time, what are the first three things you would look at? The number one thing you need to know is what's your cost per signed case, and that's a great question. If you have an agency or if you have a PPC manager, and that person isn't looking at that, that's the number one data point. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how many times your ads were shown, or how many clicks you got, or even how many conversions you got, or how

many calls or chats. It matters how many of those turned into clients, signed clients, paying clients, or contingency clients. So the number one thing is conversions. The conversions to signed clients, the cost converted client, and the percentage rate. So what percentage of my leads are turning into signed clients? What's the cost per signed client? Then the next thing I want to look at is what's the cost per lead. So how many leads did I get, and how many those were calls, forms, and chats, and what was the cost per call, calls, forms, and chats? And then you can go into some of the

more detailed diagnostics we talked about, such as the number of clicks, the click-through rate, the the the performance of the different ad groups, ads, and landing pages. What should I do if my firm isn't showing up in the LSA results? Should I increase the budget, get more Google Business reviews, or target additional locations? There's a couple different sort of ways to look at that. If you have multiple locations, I would get a Google Business Profile for all those locations, and I would run my LSA campaign to each location. Now, the only one proviso to that, or one restriction, is you

need to get one to two new Google reviews per week. I mentioned that earlier, that that seems to be like the magic for the LSAs, and if Google's rep, the Google reps actually told us that, and then that would be the same for Google Maps SEO.

And by the way, Google Maps SEO is closely tied to overall website SEO, so getting lots of local reviews, getting lots of local traffic, getting lots of local links greatly increases your overall website SEO, and is critical for maps SEO. And getting those local LSA reviews are really critical for your LSAs. First and foremost, do you do multiple locations? Yes, and do multiple locations if you have enough cases each month to get reviews on both sites, and a third site and a fourth site, fourth location, if if you're a firm that does like 100 clients resolved every month, you should

easily go for four locations, and you can target you know different parts of town with the Google Maps location. Now you can't just fake it. You can't just have a Regis office or a WeWork. You know you got to get an actual location. I always tell lawyers get a location inside your accountant's office because it confuses Google. Like a lot of them are like, "Oh, my buddy is a family lawyer. I can go get an office inside his office, but that confuses Google a little bit. So, if you get a location inside your accountant's office, you actually need should have signage, and people should be able

to book appointments to come and meet you there. Then that's a real location that you can have a Google Business Profile, and you can have an LSA tied to. So the first part of that question is: Do I target additional locations? Yes, if you have the wherewithal to have a physical office or an office inside someone's office, but not a WeWork, and one to two new Google reviews per location per week. What if my firm isn't showing up in LSA results? The biggest things is, like, if you've done a poor job managing that program, that's why you're not showing up. Like I mentioned before, you got to

answer the phone. You can't have any missed calls. You got to give Google feedback at the back end of the program. So if you didn't do your part, one thing you might want to do is reboot and rebuild a completely brand new LSA. So what you can do is cancel the old LSA, put up a new LSA, change a few different things, maybe submit a different picture, submit different, have different sort of budgets and geo targets, just so it feels fresh to Google. And sometimes Google will give you a fresh start. They'll give you four or five leads that first month. They'll give you eight or 10 the second

month. And if you do a great job answering the phone, getting it to the back end of the system, dispositioning those leads, you can do really well. Another strategy you can do is basically think of the LSAs like a faucet, so you need to get the faucet flowing. So some people are very very specific. I only want catastrophic injuries. Of course, we all only want catastrophic injuries if you're if you're in personal injury. But what you need to do is open it up and say, "I'll take dog bites. I'll take scooter injuries. I'll take truck accidents. I'll take motorcycle accidents. And even you

might want to go so far as I'll take general law inquiries. And you want to spend two or $3,000 on leads, and you got to watch your budget very, very closely. But if you get a real estate case, send it to your buddy from law school who's a real estate lawyer. If you get a family law case, say, hey, you know, I can handle that. I can help you with that. Hang up the phone with the recording, connect, call a person right back and introduce them to your your friend from from law school who's a criminal lawyer in family. So what you want to do is you want to get the faucet flowing like a

funnel. And now, okay, now Google's giving you leads because they'll basically you know not everybody's going to say give me any type of law lead, and then you get the faucet flowing, and once it's flowing, then you can start restricting it back. You can restrict the geo targeting a little bit. You can restrict the practice areas. You definitely want to get rid of the general law leads.

But a lot of times, once we get it flowing, we answer the phone, we disposition the calls, we get the Google reviews. You do the other parts of the secret algorithm correctly. It's not so secret anymore, is it? I'm also going to give you guys the handbook again. This is pretty cool, and we've addressed how to get in the local service ads. So again, this is our hottest trends handbook for law firms. So again, if your marketing director wasn't on this call, if your intake team who manages. Your LSAs. You can download this just by scanning it, or going to tengoldenrolls.com/hottrends. Just

hold your phone up to it with the camera on, and it should give you a link to this page. We've got LSA tips in there, the strategies to get in the AI overviews we talked about, and strategies for building your Google Maps. All right, we'll take one last question, and then we'll be right up to an hour. Questions from Kendrick on LinkedIn: If your competitor is showing up in both Google I/Os and PPC, while you're showing up in one, how many potential cases do you think you might be losing each month? You know, that's a good question because it's very complex, and it depends completely. Like,

who's your competitor, Morgan and Morgan, or is it you know the local guy that you see in the local courts? So just ballpark. Let's use examples of the smaller advertiser, not small. They were spending $20,000 in advertising, and I think they signed seven cases for four at $1,400 a case. They'd probably be doing about the same in LSAs. So if you're, you know, you you're getting seven to 10 cases from pay per click each month, and seven to 10 cases from LSAs each month, there's a pretty good likelihood that your competitor is grabbing seven to 10 cases out of the market that you're not

getting. So ideally, you do it all, right? Ideally, you do SEO, pay per click, LSAs. You've got a nice video campaign answering questions we talked about, and you're repositioning yourself for the AI overviews. You're becoming an expert. You've got lots of frequently asked questions and schema code on your website to perform well in the AI overviews. Like I do, ideally you're doing it all, and I'd be happy to talk to you all about how we can do it all. And you know, if you have limited budget, as I said, I would answer questions. You know, you could do it yourself on your cell phone. Do four

question and answers once a month. Takes 15 minutes. Give it to an intern. Have them post it like you showed. We call it cascading. So write a blog and post the video on your blog. Post it on your Google Maps. Post it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. So now you've got a question and answer on your website in all your socials and Google Maps. Really good for Google Maps SE. And then get signed up for the local service ads. So all you can do is very basic: answer question SEO. We call it cascading, and do the local service ads. You could do that yourself. And then if you have a little bit of

success and you want to call an agency, hey, I hope I'm your first call. j@tengoldenrules.com, or go to tengoldenrues.com and just do a chat, and we'll get in touch with you right away. We'll be happy to do the audit for you, as I mentioned earlier. Thanks, everyone, for being here. I had a little bit of fun today. Hopefully, you all did too. So, have a great day, everybody. Thank you for being here. And for those of you on YouTube in the future, hey, please get in touch with me. If nothing else, give us a thumbs up on this video on YouTube. If you made it this far, you got some value. So

give us a thumbs up. Subscribe to the YouTube or iTunes, and I really appreciate a five-star review on iTunes as well. Thanks so much, everybody. Have a great day.