Our Team FAQs

It’s important for us to understand if we’re meeting your objectives in the quality of the cases that we’re getting for you so we can make those updates, either to the creative or criteria and continue to give you the successful, high-quality leads you’re looking for.

Our strategy for running these campaigns on social platforms like Facebook or Tiktok, is to create ads that grab users’ attention and take them to a landing page. On the landing page, we evaluate against your criteria. When a match is qualified, we present the retainer on the spot and we have call center followup. The great thing about having the criteria on these landing pages is that, as the tort changes and either some of the criteria are now disqualified or there are additional qualifiers we need to add, we can make those updates without ever touching your ad campaigns. Therefore, we can skip your ads reentering the platform’s learning phase and are able to take advantage of the campaigns that have already been spending and bringing you results.

Our strategy for running these campaigns on social platforms like Facebook or TikTok is to create ads that grab user attention, and take them to a landing page. On the landing page, we evaluate them against your criteria. When they match as qualified, we present the retainer on the spot, and we have our call center follow up. The great thing about having the criteria on these landing pages is that as the tort changes and some of the criteria become disqualified or there are additional qualifiers we need to add, we can make those updates without ever touching your ad campaigns. This lets us skip your ads reentering the platform’s learning phase and allows us to take advantage of the campaigns that have already been spending and bringing you results.

Our strategy for running these campaigns on social platforms like Facebook or TikTok is to create ads that grab user attention, and take them to a landing page. On the landing page, we evaluate them against your criteria. When they match as qualified, we present the retainer on the spot, and we have our call center follow up. The great thing about having the criteria on these landing pages is that as the tort changes and some of the criteria become disqualified or there are additional qualifiers we need to add, we can make those updates without ever touching your ad campaigns. This lets us skip your ads reentering the platform’s learning phase and allows us to take advantage of the campaigns that have already been spending and bringing you results.

Our strategy for running these campaigns on social platforms like Facebook or Tiktok, is to create ads that grab users’ attention and take them to a landing page. On the landing page, we evaluate against your criteria. When a match is qualified, we present the retainer on the spot and we have call center followup. The great thing about having the criteria on these landing pages is that, as the tort changes and either some of the criteria are now disqualified or there are additional qualifiers we need to add, we can make those updates without ever touching your ad campaigns. Therefore, we can skip your ads reentering the platform’s learning phase and are able to take advantage of the campaigns that have already been spending and bringing you results.

Our strategy for running these campaigns on social platforms like Facebook or TikTok is to create ads that grab user attention, and take them to a landing page. On the landing page, we evaluate them against your criteria. When they match as qualified, we present the retainer on the spot, and we have our call center follow up. The great thing about having the criteria on these landing pages is that as the tort changes and some of the criteria become disqualified or there are additional qualifiers we need to add, we can make those updates without ever touching your ad campaigns. This lets us skip your ads reentering the platform’s learning phase and allows us to take advantage of the campaigns that have already been spending and bringing you results.

Our strategy for running these campaigns on social platforms like Facebook or TikTok is to create ads that grab user attention, and take them to a landing page. On the landing page, we evaluate them against your criteria. When they match as qualified, we present the retainer on the spot, and we have our call center follow up. The great thing about having the criteria on these landing pages is that as the tort changes and some of the criteria become disqualified or there are additional qualifiers we need to add, we can make those updates without ever touching your ad campaigns. This lets us skip your ads reentering the platform’s learning phase and allows us to take advantage of the campaigns that have already been spending and bringing you results.

Our strategy for running these campaigns on social platforms like Facebook or Tiktok, is to create ads that grab users’ attention and take them to a landing page. On the landing page, we evaluate against your criteria. When a match is qualified, we present the retainer on the spot and we have call center followup. The great thing about having the criteria on these landing pages is that, as the tort changes and either some of the criteria are now disqualified or there are additional qualifiers we need to add, we can make those updates without ever touching your ad campaigns. Therefore, we can skip your ads reentering the platform’s learning phase and are able to take advantage of the campaigns that have already been spending and bringing you results.

We get this question a lot at TSEG: “Can I just start with SEO and maybe look at paid advertising down the road?” You absolutely can! The problem is you have to realize that SEO is a long-term investment. You may not get a good return on your SEO investment for two to three years, so we always strongly recommend paid advertising to our firms, every single month, even right out the gate. That is going to provide you cases right away. With paid advertising, you immediately jump to the top of Google. You’re in the Google ads; when someone is searching, you’re in the top three results consistently. That will provide you cases in order to make the long-term investment a little bit more sustainable.

There’s a reason why your competitors are investing so much on SEO each month. The top firms are the ones that are analyzing the cases. They’re saying “where’s our best cost per case coming from?” These firms will go from a $10,000 SEO investment in seeing that this is bringing in 30-40 cases a month. They’ll take that $10,000 and increase it to $30,000, $40,000, $50,000. That’s because they know how valuable that top spot is. Until you know how valuable that spot is, it’s hard to make that investment. How can you just say “Hey, I want to invest $50,000 a month” on my SEO, when you don’t know how many cases are coming in? Our clients that see that, understand that investment, and they’re going to keep increasing their SEO until their cost per case starts increasing.

There’s no one blanket price on SEO costs. When we build a budget, we look at what your competitors are spending on their websites, we look at how long they’ve been spending that money, how strong their website is, and how much money it’s going to take to actually compete with them. There’s no one number. You can’t just say “Hey, $10,000 a month and that’s going to get you where you want to be.” We start with an aggressive enough number in your market to compete, and then from there, it can go up or down. Let’s say you’re super dominant in SEO with that fee. We can take a little bit of that money away from that and put it into paid advertising to increase cases. Let’s say it’s the opposite: you’re kind of in the mix, but we think an extra $5,000-$10,000 a month could get you to the top and pick you up another 10 cases. We’re going to make that recommendation. I always recommend a fluid budget when it comes to SEO, so we can count the competition. That’s what your competitors are doing, and if they’re increasing, you’re going to be falling back and vice versa.

We recommend that our law firms do not write content. That can be tough for a lot of lawyers because they think think “I’m the expert. I want to be writing about car accidents. I don’t like a lot of the ‘Google-written’ content out there.” The problem is you could have the best legal content written in the world, but if you don’t show up on the first page, no one’s ever going to find it, no one’s going to read it, and you’re not going to get cases from it.

Google has made significant updates over the past few years, mainly around Google Local. They’re trying to get away from the one firm that dominates the entire city, no matter where they’re located. So, this has put more of an emphasis on where your location is. Ideally, you want to have multiple locations through the city, because then you’re going to be showing up much better throughout all the traffic. Really, what you want to look at is the most populated parts of the city are. Where are the clients that you want living? A lot of firms will choose office locations next to major highways and use their office as a billboard. It’s a huge sign out there. It’s a free billboard, right in your office. Consult with your digital marketing company before picking an office, because it can be detrimental to your business to just have an office that’s too far away from everyone in the city.

Four or five years ago, getting towards the city center was the most important thing, until the recent updates by Google that made it more and more important where your office is actually located. The goal with your Google local is to show up as far away from your office in the top three results as possible. The problem is, it’s not just the city center anymore. It’s where people are actually living; where your clients actually are is where you want to focus. So be very strategic about where you pick an office. Make sure to consult with your digital marketing group about where the best location would be, especially if you’re going to open up multiple locations.

We get this response a lot from lawyers: “I get all my business from referrals. I don’t need a marketing company. I don’t need to do any advertising.” and that’s great. You’re getting referrals because you’re a good lawyer and your colleagues understand that. But, by completely neglecting advertising and Google, you’re neglecting thousands and thousands of other people who need a lawyer like you. Many people will just go to the internet, Google “personal injury lawyer,” and pick the top person there, not being invested in who they are, or how qualified they are, or how great of a lawyer they are, and give them a call. That person should be you. If you’re successful enough to be getting referrals from your colleagues, you should be to pick up many many additional cases from the internet, just by showing up at the top of Google. Those are cases that are coming direct to you – you don’t have to pay referrals out on those. I would strongly recommend taking some of your success and investing it directly into Google or directly into advertising, so you can pick up additional cases. I think, long term, that’s going to be much more sustainable than just relying on your colleagues to send you business.

We’ve made a big change in the past five years on how we analyze our clients’ success from digital advertising. We did this because there are so many unknowns when it comes to digital advertising. We get it all the time, where a firm will tell us “hey, I’m getting all my cases from TV” or “I’m getting all my cases from Google.” Is that actually true? The only way to know for sure is to put tracking numbers on every single thing you do. If you’re running Facebook ads, put a tracking number on them. Google Ads. Even on your Google maps or organic, have tracking numbers on everything. We moved to this because it enables us to make decisions for your firm that are going to get you more cases in the long run. If we’re investing a total of $50,000 a month and $20,000 of that is going towards Google ads, and you’re only getting one or two cases, we need to switch something up. Vice versa, if you’re spending $40,000 and only $5,000 on organic but you’re getting 20 cases a month from that, we need to know that data. That’s the only way you can make qualified decisions for your firm. We put tracking numbers on everything. We listen to every single call and lead that comes into your business and where they’re coming from. So, on a month to month basis, we can take your $50,000 budget and put that investment towards Google ads or Google SEO. Whatever’s working, whatever is driving the most cases, you need to know that number, and if you don’t, that’s a huge problem. I’d say every firm needs to ask themselves “where are my cases coming from?,” not “where do I think my cases are coming from?” You need to know that number of “it was a Facebook ad that produced this case.” If you don’t, that’s a major problem, and you’re probably throwing a lot of money in the trash.

As a lawyer, to help your digital agency the most, give them case feedback. You need to make sure your digital agency is analyzing your campaigns based on case feedback, or they’re really just in the dark, guessing “hey i think the most cases are coming from here.” So, the best thing you can do for your agency is not only give them case feedback, but give them the name and the phone numbers of those actual cases. That allows companies like ours to take those names, take those numbers, and see where exactly they came from – if it was from Google Ads or from SEO – and optimize the campaigns based on that signed case. We can take the name and the number of someone who signed up Google Ads, and actually find the exact key term that they searched. So over a long period of time, a year or two years, we have enough data to look back at the campaign and say “this key term 40% of our cases. Lets focus our budget more on that key term. Lets increase our bids there, so we’re dominant where your cases are actually coming from.” So I’d say that is the most important piece of your relationship with your digital agency, and we require all our firms to give us that data.

At TSEG, we focus on cost per case because that’s really the only number that matters. Many in this industry will throw around impressions and clicks like they actually matter. The reason it doesn’t matter is you can get a ton of traffic to your website, but if it’s all junk, not turning into cases, there’s really no point in having all those people go to your website. It’s all about quality. All about cases. If it comes down to you getting 10 clicks or 1,000 clicks, and those 10 clicks turn into a case, I’m picking the ten clicks every time. The way we track cases is, we put a tracking number on everything. On your Facebook ads, on your Google ads, Google SEO, organic, your maps. Everything has a tracking number, so every lead that comes to your door, every call, every form, we know exactly where it’s coming from. We require our clients to give us case feedback of actual names of people who signed up’s settlement numbers, so we can accurately track ROI. That’s the best way to do it, because then, on a monthly basis, we can make decisions with your marketing budget without having to talk to you. If you have a $50,000 budget and we analyze your campaign and find that you got 30 cases from your Google ads and only five from SEO, we might focus more on your Google ads, and vice versa. If you’re getting more cases from SEO, lets pull back on Google ads and invest more in that. The only way to make an accurate, qualified decision is to know your case data. If you don’t give that feedback, your marketing company is going to be in the dark. They’re just going to be guessing “we got a bunch of leads from Google ads. It must be working.” But if none of those turn into cases, you’re just wasting your money. Without providing that feedback and working with your marketing company on a weekly basis, you’re going to be throwing a lot of money away.

To accurately know if your paid advertising is working or not, you have to be tracking all of your leads and where they’re coming from. If you’re paying Google ads, Bing ads, Facebook ads, you need to have tracking numbers on all of those to see where your leads are coming from and your investment for each of those. Every single month, you should be looking at how many cases you get from Google ads versus how much you spent. You need to be careful here, because you don’t want to panic if you only got one case that month from Google ads and you spent 10 grand and you’re like “that’s a terrible cost per case. Lets cut it off.” You want to make sure you have five to six months worth of data to actually make that decision. It’s very inconsistent. We’ve had months where you spend $20,000 and you only get four cases, and we’ve had months where you spend $20,000 and you get 15 cases. So, you want to give it enough time, I’d say five, six months, to actually analyze and make qualified decisions, because, just like anything, there’s going to be ebbs and flows of where your leads are coming from. But, if you’re not tracking all of that, you’ll never know. So, I would look at everything on a month to month basis, take it with a grain of salt, and then really make qualified decisions for your firm after three, four, five months of data.

For a Google ad campaign to start producing results, you really have to give it at least a few months. Every single ad campaign out there, including Facebook ads, goes through a “learning” period. Some platforms take a little bit longer. That’s not to say that you should invest three months in Google ads and not get a single thing out of it. But, you don’t want to start a Google ad campaign and, for a month not get a case and pull the plug. That’s because the Google algorithm is learning. Every lead you get, every conversion you get, it’s learning from itself. You want to make sure to not go full force right away. The way we treat a brand new ad campaign is we’re a little more conservative in the first month. We’re going to bid low, and we’re going inching our bids up to see what the competitors are actually bidding for those top terms. You want to analyze your leads from there. Are there actual good leads? Should you not be bidding on that term at all when this other term’s producing more cases? So the first few months, we’re learning a ton. We’re learning how much your competitors are spending, we’re learning which leads are turning into cases, and which ones we should focus on. I’d say, give it at least three months, ideally six, to truly analyze if you’re getting a good return on your investment from paid advertising.

We’ve learned over the past decade or so that it’s really not just about bidding as little as possible or trying to get the cheapest lead from Google ads because Google ads is an auction system. If you’re bidding on “personal injury lawyer” and you’re bidding the fourth most among your competitors, you’re not going to be showing up in the top three. The problem with that is people that call on the first three firms and get rejected are just going to keep calling down the list. They get in a car accident, there are no injuries, and the top three firms reject them. They finally click on your ad, which is fourth, and they call you, and you’re going to say “I’m getting nothing but junk from my Google ads.” So, it is very important, whatever your budget is, you want to show up in the top two for your relevant terms. That might mean paying a ton more per click, but I would rather have four $300 clicks that turn into a case than a thousand $1 clicks that get you nothing, waste your intake’s time, and waste your time because they’ve already been declined by multiple lawyers.

At TSEG we get this question a lot, especially in the last few years there’s been a ton of talk about branding your firm, especially with social media. There are many companies out there pushing that all you need is a strong brand. I would strongly disagree with that. I recommend to new firms in a competitive city to start out with maybe 5% of their whole budget on brand. That doesn’t seem like a ton, but 5% can go really far when it comes to social media. If you take your budget and decide to throw it all 100% into social media and brand yourself and that’s going to get a lot of cases, that’s not going to work. We’ve tried it. It’s not going to get you a lot of direct cases. So, whatever your budget is, I’d say 95% of it should be focused still on Google, whether that’s Google ads or SEO. That’s where the bulk majority of the cases in 2022 are coming from. I would focus it there. I would still put 5% or so on brand. $200 on Facebook can go a really long way in your city. At a certain point, when you’re investing too much on Facebook and social media for your brand you’re just going to be hitting up the same people over and over again. It’s really a completely different type of marketing. Your branding is more of your pitch marketing. You’re pitching to someone that “if you ever get into a car accident or if you ever get injured, you should call me.” Whereas Google, it’s all “catch marketing.” These are people who are already injured, people who were already in an accident that are looking for a lawyer, right then and there. You’re going to have a lot more success immediately by showing up for some direct searches from people already looking for lawyers. While, long term, you can focus on your brand and use those cases to fund further branding efforts, whether that’s billboards or TV down the road. We always recommend starting out to build your case inventory, get some money in the door, and then continually invest that into other advertising methods.

We recommend about 5% or so of your budget, starting out, going to your brand over direct search. I say this because you want to get immediate cases if you’re starting out. Down the road, lets say you are dominant on Google, bringing in 40-50 cases through paid and organic, then you can start taking some of that money and invest more of it into your brand. Look at TV, look at billboards, that’s still really strong. People are still calling the firms that are on TV. But if you don’t have that kind of budget where you can go in a market immediately and say “I want to throw $300,000 a month, half on TV half on digital,” you want to start conservatively, and I would put only 5% into brand. Down the road, when you start becoming really successful and having a good case flow, a good return on your investment, I would strongly recommend looking at other branding efforts like billboards or TV.

I would focus first on office location. Consult with a digital agency about where you should put your office because that is extremely important, especially as a new lawyer. Ask yourself “Where do you want to show up?” You want to be in a location where your clients are, and the bulk majority of your clients are in your city. So I would start there. Pick an office location. Then I’d build a website. It doesn’t need to be the best website in the world starting out, but get a website that looks professional, so that way you’re starting out with a good base. From there, analyze your budget. If you have a $5,000 budget vs a $100,000 budget, I’m going to give you a different recommendation. If you’re on the lower end, I would start out with Google Local Service Ads, for sure. I think that’s a must. We’re finding our cheapest cost per case right now is going Google Local Service Ads. That may change in two to three years, but right now I’d set that profile up. It’s a tedious process, but I would do that, because you could invest a small amount of money that actually goes pretty far. Then I would do the rest on either SEO or your Google Ads, direct search because that’s going to provide you some direct cases while you’re trying to build your firm. I would consult with a digital agency you trust from the get-go. Lawyers can make a lot of mistakes by trying to go too aggressive to fast, trying to spend too much money on a website without consulting anybody, and waste a lot of money. So I would ask your colleagues “which digital agencies do you trust?” to actually get a good recommendation to start and then go from there, because your colleagues probably have burned three or four times by different agencies and made mistakes in marketing. So talk to other attorneys. I would Google the top four lawyers in each city because they’ve done a pretty good job to get there. Call them up. Ask them what they’ve done. Most of these lawyers are happy to help and give you a good recommendation and talk about things that didn’t work for them.

I would come up with a case goal, to start out. How many cases do you want on a monthly basis? Some lawyers will be like “I want 1,000.” If you want 1,000 cases a month, you’re probably spending $200k-$300k a month to get that. Be realistic. If you’re starting out a solo firm and you have one person answering the phone, you’re obviously not going to be able to take 1,000 cases. So, maybe start with 5-10. If you want five cases a month, you should probably be looking at least a $10,000 investment on a monthly basis, spread out between all your marketing. You can grow from there. Come up with a plan to get 10 cases a month for the first six months, after that you can jump to 20. Then you can come up with a budget. “OK lets spend $10,000 a month for the first six months and then grow from there based on case results.”

There is definitely not one magic bullet when it comes to getting cases from the internet. What I would do, if I were you, is look at your competitors, look at who is successful, and what they are doing in your market. I would talk to your colleagues, talk to the people you trust, and ask them about their success, ask them about the mistakes they’ve made, and try to learn from that. Also, try to find a partner or a digital agency that you trust because the digital agencies are the ones that up to speed on all new updates – new things that come out. The most recent one was Google Local Service Ads, which came out a year and a half ago. The first people to sign up for that and get their profile live were getting all of the cases. Cases were flying in. People were getting a cost per case of $100 or $200. It was just amazing. Without a partner that you trust, you’re most likely not going to find out about that until it’s too late. You find out five to six months down the road that Google Local Service Ads are working. Well, guess what? You just missed out on five or six months worth of cases. So you want to find an agency that you trust, colleagues that you trust to give you good recommendations, but you want to be really well-rounded. That way, when a platform comes out like Google Local Service Ads that works, you can jump into that, but not fully rely on it. Because, there’s a good chance in a year or so, that’s going to be competitive, hard, and cases aren’t going to be as easy to get. So you’d better be everywhere else. You’d better have a good SEO ranking. You’d better have a good website. You’d better have Google Ads. That will allow you to deal with the ebbs and flows of the digital marketing industry. What works this month, may not work next month. You have to be ready to make a move on a dime and adjust your budget to where the cases are actually coming from.

I would say the best strategy for a brand new mass tort is just throw a little bit of money at Facebook. You don’t have to throw a ton. You’d be shocked how much $1,000-$2,000 a month goes on Facebook, especially when it’s a brand new tort. You don’t know who’s out there, you don’t know if even digital marketing is the way to get to these people. But it’s such a small investment. You can find out a ton of data, just from Facebook. I would say the baby NEC formula, a recent case, is a great example of this. We had a firm come to us and say “I don’t think any cases are out there, but I just want to try it. Lets see how much $5,000 will get us on Facebook.” So, we ran a campaign for $5,000 and cases just started flying in. We were getting at $300 a case right away. That was the first three months until people really started hearing about it and picking up traction, and now you can’t get a case for any less than $4,000-$5,000. So the firms that jump in early, they’re picking up a ton of cases. This can be risky because maybe the case doesn’t work out and you lose all that investment. But, you don’t know if you don’t invest a little bit into it. By the time you hear about it at these conferences, or from a colleague, it’s too late. People have already picked up a ton of the inventory, and you’re going to pay a lot more per case than you would just starting out. So, I would definitely just throw a little bit at social media, see what you get, and go from there.

NEC has been one of the most popular and competitive mass torts of the last six months or so. Our strategy that we find works best to pick NEC cases is we’re relying a ton on social media, a ton on native advertising, multiple platforms, and we send them through a Simply Convert landing page. A Simply Convert landing page is a chatbot that will actually ask every single qualifying question to the visitor before you even talk to them. I think this works so much better than just a general contact form because you’re actually asking the questions to qualify them. If you throw up a general contact form, you’re going to get so may leads, so much junk, your call team is going to be spending time on the phone with people who aren’t even qualified. This cuts out 80%-90% of the leads right there, so our call team can focus on only calling the people who actually qualify for the litigation and then signing them up. We’ve tried all the different strategies. This has been, by far, the most successful at signing up qualified NEC cases. Getting the full packet signed. Getting the plaintiff fact sheet signed. This has been our best strategy by to sign up NEC cases.

The Paraquat litigation has been going on for over a decade. The last couple of years, firms have been aggressively trying to pick up Paraquat cases. To start out, social media was by far the best way to pick up Paraquat cases. When our firms got in two year ago, when there wasn’t a lot of competition, they were picking up cases left and right. Then, halfway through about a year ago, TV was the best way to get Paraquat cases. I would always make sure when you’re going into any mass tort to constantly be analyzing all your platforms. Where am I getting my best cost per case and the highest quality cases? So, you can make adjustments on the fly. We had a ton of budget going to Parquat, but we pulled that back because the cost per case was getting outrageous, $7,000-10,000. We pulled back, for a month or two, got back into digital marketing, and our cost per dropped all the way to $2,000-$3,000. We’ve been kind of consistently in that area over the past year or so. The best strategy we’ve found with Paraquat is to go through a Simply Convert landing page. Simply Convert landing page is a chat bot that’s built in with your criteria for cases. If someone sees your Facebook ad, clicks through, and goes to the bot, the Simply Convert landing page is actually going to qualify or disqualify that person. We’re going to ask them the questions. “Do you have Parkinson’s disease? Do you have symptoms? Was this direct exposure? Did you work on a farm that used Paraquat?” That’s going to eliminate 80%-90% of the people that are not going to be qualified. That’s going to save you a ton of call time, a ton of staff time, following up on these leads because you’ll be focusing on the 10%-20% of people that do actually qualify for litigation.

What’s great about the Google Local Service Ads is that it’s pay per lead. Basically, any lead that comes through to your law firm, that’s all you’re being charged for. With Google Ads and the pay per click model, it’s basically you pay PER click. You could pay for ten clicks, but it doesn’t mean that those are going to be actual conversions. You could pay $200 per click on a car accident lead. You could pay 10 of those and you’re hoping to get one to two conversions. Hopefully those turn into cases. With Google Local Service Ads, you’re paying every single time the phone comes through. It’s been very cost effective, which is great. The cost per lead has been great. The cost per case has been fantastic. You don’t want to completely go away from Google Ads, because you don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket. If there’s anything that I’ve learned with Google is that they can shake things up at any moment. You could have pulled your entire PPC budget and you’re only doing LSA. Google could do an algorithm update, and all of a sudden, PPC is fantastic again. So, you want to make sure you’re tracking your cost per lead, tracking your cost per case and make sure that both campaigns are being successful.

We keep your budget fluid for SEO. So, if you’re on the second page of Google, you’re not getting leads. You’re not getting cases. What we’re trying to do is get you leads. Get you cases. So, whatever that takes, we’re trying to move you up to the top spots, whether that means we’re writing more content, whether we’re doing more backlinks, whether we’re doing more Google My Business posts. Google likes to shake things up every now and then, so one thing that’s working one month may not work another month. We’re going to make the optimizations necessary.

Google rolled these out about a year and a half ago. It’s basically a profile that sits at the very top of Google. It’s a pay per lead system. Every single time that someone is calling your firm, that’s all you’re being charged for. In the past, with traditional PPC, you might spend $200 for a click, but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to lead to somebody that’s calling your firm. What’s great about Google screening Google Local Service Ads: it’s all pay per lead. Anybody that’s calling your firm, that’s all you’re being charged for. We’ve consistently been able to rank our clients in the top three, get them consistent leads, and get them consistent cases.

It’s really “pitch” vs “catch” marketing. I hear firms that are like “I want to get into branding,” and that’s fantastic. Social media is great for that. It’s very cost effective, but it’s pitch marketing. You’re having your ad show up on social media feeds nonstop, just over and over and over again. The person may not be getting into an accident that day, that next week, but they’re going to keep seeing your ads over and over and over again, so that when they are doing a search for “personal injury lawyer,” down the road, they’re remembering you. They’ve seen you before. That’s when they click on your website and turn into a lead or a case. With Google Ads, someone’s already been in an accident. It’s a high-intent search. Those clicks are fantastic. It’s somebody that’s coming directly to your website and converting and turning into a lead or a case. But, you’ve got to differentiate the two. I talk to firms all the time. They want to do social media ads, but then they pause them after a couple of months because they think “Hey I’m not getting leads and cases from it.” But, that’s not really its intent, right? The intent is to get your firm out there as much as possible, to keep hitting people over and over again so that when they do get into an accident down the line, you’re the first person that they think of.

We get this question asked a lot. “Do I have to use your call center? Can I use my own call center?” or “If we’re not using yours, do you recommend one?” The biggest thing here that we’ve found over the past couple of years is the more optimizations that we can make within a campaign, the better that it’s going to be. With utilizing our call center, we can see every single day. I get a report that says how many leads are coming through, how many are being signed, and how many are being declined. And that’s the biggest thing possible. If we start a campaign off and we’re a couple days in and we’re only getting disqualified leads, I can see the daily report, tell our team to optimize everything, and then bam. That can be the biggest thing that makes or breaks a campaign. You may have an awesome call center and a great team, and we don’t mind doing that. We can run everything through a landing page and still send it over to your call center. We just have to get either daily, or every two days, we have to get reports.

We don’t have one blanket price. We basically take a look at your website, where it’s ranking, how much content is already on there, and then we stack that up against your competition. How much work it’s going to take for us to get you from page two, page three, page four, or wherever you’re at not getting leads and cases, up to page one and into the map locations. Each market is different. Each practice area is different.

User experience is the experience in the digital space from seeing a digital ad on Facebook or some other social media through that lead submitting and capturing that lead at the end and signing them. That whole context of “what time of day are they most likely to engage?” or “what creative is going to have that emotional response for them to go further into answering questions and eventually signing?” The context of that entire experience is what is important in digital marketing to drive the highest conversions.

Split testing is a very important tool to quickly get feedback from what types of creatives are working and what kind of language is working so you can continue to optimize your spend and have your money work the best for you. So, split testing is all about understanding what works and what doesn’t work, versus just continuing to run the same creative or the same copy over and over, and not necessarily drive any better results. A split test we’ve done previously is taking two sets of copy, maybe for a single ad. They have the same creative, but in that split test, the language we’re using may be more general and then the other language is trying to elicit an emotional response. So, in the case of talc, you have a general that’s talking about ovarian cancer and then you have a specific one that’s talking about the Texas Two Step and bankruptcy, and you’re trying to elicit some anger. Those two copy differences is what we would test to see which ones are driving higher conversions. Your ad spend beyond the initial testing period, which would typically be within the first few days of ad spend, would start to optimize toward the one that was more successful.

This is the great thing about digital marketing, compared to more traditional billboards, and even TV for that matter. In the digital space, you’re able to track a lot better the ad spend to the lead. Even if you’re having an organic lift in traffic, that’s very easy to understand where your baseline is and where you’re going. So, in the digital space, how you’re going to track it, and what you can expect on ROI is very clear reporting and understanding of attribution versus a TV ad or a radio ad or a billboard taking credit for business you would have already had.

I think the best strategy would be looking for a tort that best fits your appetite for risk and reward. Starting out, and you may not know that, would be looking for something that’s higher volume, but the cost per case hasn’t got that high yet; there’s not that much competition there. So that would be an evaluation that we do, and we work with our clients to see what makes the most sense for where they’re at.

What most of our clients want to know right away is cost per case. The numbers that matter, the cost per case, the cost per qualified lead, those are the ones that we really try to focus on and work with you on to make sure that your ad spend and your SEO spend are bringing back that ROI for you.

When tracking our marketing efforts, the main thing to know is where your ad dollars are going on each platform and campaign. That way, we’re able to have the right mix of ad spend on different platforms, whether you’re spending on Facebook or on Google Search or you’ve got your money in SEO. Being able to track all those different marketing efforts helps us provide the right recipe for you and success for you. That will differ from client to client and what their objective is.

At TSEG, we’ve been exclusive for as long as we’ve been a company, over 13 years now. We’ve gone back and forth a couple times on this. Should we be exclusive? Should we not? We always come down to the same answer: yes let’s be exclusive. We can put all our efforts into one single client. There’s only three spots in maps on Google. There’s only three spots on the local service ads. Three spots on Google ads. At a certain point, if you have four or five clients in one city, you’re competing against yourself. Being exclusive allows us to put all our eggs in one basket and make sure that firm is as dominant as possible. We’ve found that by doing this, our firms typically grow quite a bit. They increase their marketing budgets. They increase their SEO budgets based on the success we’ve had together. We’ve been able to successfully grow a lot of law firms together that way. We’ve kind of chosen to always stick with the exclusive model.

We require our clients to get on weekly, if not, biweekly calls with us to to analyze, talk about performance of the campaign, go through the leads, make sure the leads are actually turning into cases, and this is critical to success. Once a month just isn’t enough. When you’re talking about a previous month and you have an aggressive marketing budget, you could have found out that you only got two cases this month. That’s a big problem. But when you’re talking weekly, we’re getting that feedback right away. “Hey, we only had one or two cases this week. We need to make some changes. Switch things up.” That allows us to make decisions on the fly. We can say “hey, let’s pull back on Google ads a little bit, lets focus more on SEO” and vice versa. If you’re analyzing everything on a weekly basis, your digital marketing partner doesn’t have to guess. We know the exact answer. We’re getting cases from this strategy, lets double down on that, or pull back. That case feedback is so important. Constant communication is so important. If you think things are slow, your marketing company needs to know about that immediately so they can make the adjustments necessary to improve.

We can send over reports as often as possible. We typically just send them once a month automatically. If you need them weekly or biweekly, we can do that. What’s more important is looking at the reports and analyzing them in the correct way. It’s easy to hit the panic button and it’s easy to look at a stat and freak out and change everything. That’s what you do not want to do. You want to look at these reports and take them all with a grain of salt. Just because your impressions dropped 200% doesn’t necessarily mean your cases dropped. So when you’re looking at these reports, make sure you talk through them with your digital agency and talk about what they actually mean, and then compare those with your cases. Because if you’re traffic’s way down, but your cases are up, it doesn’t really matter that your traffic is down. But, make sure when you’re looking at these things, look at them with your digital marketing partner. Ask the right questions, so that we as an agency can walk you through what they actually mean and make the steps necessary to keep improving your firm.

Our rule of thumb is you want to get at least 10 cases. What that means is, you need to figure out what’s the average cost per case for this litigation. If the average cost per case is $4,000, you want to come in with at least a $40,000 budget. That’s kind of a more proven, down the road mass tort. If it’s a brand new tort, I always suggest “let’s throw $5,000-$10,000 at it and see what we get” because you don’t need to be that aggressive. But if it’s a competitive one, you want to make sure to give yourself enough of a budget to sustain the learning period. All these platforms have a “learning period.” We try to shorten that to about a week, but if you pull the plug at that point, your investment goes away. So you want to make sure to give yourself enough time and enough budget to get a campaign rolling, and then keep it rolling.

We’ve found that the main difference is for single events, Google is still king. With mass torts, social media has been king for a while now. It’s not going to always be that way, but we always try to stay on top of market trends and single event always had the most success on Google. Does that mean you have to ignore social media? No. But I think a much smaller percent of your budget should go to social media. And then mass torts, we haven’t had a ton of success on Google unless it’s organic. The cost for click can be pretty high on some of these cases, so we’ve had more success on Facebook. But it’s also tort to tort. So, if you have a brand new tort and no one’s advertising it, Google may be a great strategy. So I think in new mass torts, you want to try all the platforms and then adjust to what’s bringing you the most cases. Then on single event right now, focus most of your money on Google, because that’s going to bring you the most direct cases.

Website speed is very important. Google rolled out an algorithm update a couple years ago putting a big emphasis on page speed. When you think about it, it makes sense, right? You can have the prettiest website. It could have the best content in the world. But if it doesn’t load, people are very impatient. People are going to bounce off your website. They’re just going to call someone else. So, it’s very important to have a fast website so that people are hitting your URL, they’re getting to a landing page, they’re calling you, and they’re immediately getting in contact with somebody.

Unfortunately, it’s very hard to rank for a city that’s outside your office location if you don’t have a verified Google Business Profile. Google wants to show law firms that are near where the user is searching from. If you don’t have a verified Google Business Profile in that specific location, you still can rank organically. What we typically do is create a landing page on your website for that specific city, build out subpages under that and then continue to optimize that portion of your site.

FAQ videos are valuable because it allows you to answer specific questions that your customers may have about your business, your services, and how to get in contact with you.

There are hundred of things that determine search engine rankings. Some of the most important ones that we look at are backlinks, your domain authority, onsite optimization, quality/optimized content, and page speed. All of these factors are vital for your overall search rankings.

Google reviews are extremely important. Not only the quantity of reviews, but your overall star rating. Google reviews build credibility for your business. Google uses it as a ranking factor, so it helps communicate trustworthiness and authority for your business.

No, absolutely not. SEO continues to be part of the foundational need for website to reach and be served. Even if we’re running search ads, SEO is still a backbone for competing on those bids. SEO is not dead.

There’s not a harm unless it’s an attorney that is also your same practice area. First thing you want to make sure you have is a unique suite number. If you don’t, you cannot share an office with another lawyer on Google. If they register their name on Google for that office, that’s their office. So one, you want to make sure you have a unique suite number. Even if you’re in the same building, get your own suite number so you can get signage on the door with your firm’s name, because Google is going to ask for that in order to become a Google Local Business. Number two, if possible, you do not want to be in a building with other personal injury lawyers or other criminal defense lawyers. Whatever your practice area is, try to find a building that doesn’t have your same practice area in there. It may not be possible. Most importantly, get your own unique suite number. Register that location with Google. Get the pictures. Get the signage. Get business cards. That’s the best way to get a new office.

We customize to what the client needs. If the client is needing us to handle secondary follow-up, including medical authorizations or questionnaires, we’re happy to do that. Some clients bring their own call centers and have had success. We can work with an existing call center as well.

It’ll largely depend on the criteria, so it’s important to have that before we can quote. We’ll typically quote cost per lead, cost per case, and cost per full packet, so you can get an idea of what makes sense for your firm.

Traditional marketing is not as effective as it used to be. With the “cutting the cord” change in our society, there are more and more people on social media. As advertisers, we’re trying to help these law firms meet the plaintiffs where they’re at. Where they’re spending their time, and trying to communicate and reach them there. Doing that will help bring a lower cost per case, as we are more effectively using the ad spend.

Social media has been traditionally thought of as a branding play, but for mass torts, social media has been a great spot for lead capture and lead generation as these ads give that call to action and we’re trying to quickly convert them in a single transaction. It’s not necessarily about branding. It’s about communicating a narrative, reaching those plaintiffs with a story of what’s happened, either the company or the product, and capturing them, retainer and all, all in one conversion.