You Can’t Hire for Law Firm SEO If You Don’t Understand It

I’m grateful for my friend, Charley Mann of Law firm Alchemy. If you’re a lawyer, subscribe to his Free Email List.

In a recent email, Charley calls out bad guru advice on hiring:

“Trying to execute a major SEO improvement? You need to find people who will help you, instead of trying to DIY it yourself.

Want to open a new practice area? It’s better to partner with a core values fit attorney than study up on the practice area yourself.

However, in both cases, you need to know enough to make a smart hire.

You cannot abdicate some level of knowledge.

This brings us to a fundamental truth about hiring:

You can’t hire for what you don’t understand.”

This resonates.

Lawyers regularly contact us asking for “SEO.”

It usually sounds something like this:

How fast can you get me to rank for [insert X keywords]?

The moment we try to educate them as to why this isn’t a great question?

On to the next firm that will guarantee rankings (good luck).

You can’t hire for what you don’t understand.

Technically, you can. But it won’t go well.

We spend a lot of time educating lawyers on the role SEO plays in legal marketing.

Why?

Because we believe they shouldn’t hire us unless they understand.

That doesn’t mean they need to understand all of the nuances and technical aspects of SEO.

But they do need some basic understanding of the fundamentals.

Most importantly, they need to understand how to measure success and hold SEO accountable for business results.

They need to understand how to connect organic traffic to qualified consultations and open cases.

They need to understand their non-brand organic cost-per-client.

They need to understand how to segment brand from non-brand traffic.

They need to understand how to do multi-touch attribution modeling.

They need to understand how to segment Google Business Profile qualified calls and consultations.

You can’t effectively hire for what you don’t understand.

Maybe you CAN hire for what you don’t understand.

But you won’t be making an informed hiring decision.

And an uninformed hiring decision will cost you a lot more…