Attorney: Richard Lawson
Firm: The Law Offices of Richard S. Lawson
Main LawLytics Sites: dui.info and georgiacriminallawyer.com
Location: Atlanta, GA
Practice Areas: DUI Defense
“LawLytics generates more cases, more reliably, and with a far better ROI than anything else I’ve ever tried. LawLytics is the product that I’ve been waiting for. With LawLytics, I’m finally in control, and can make my firm’s web presence into what I want it to be.”
Richard’s law firm was already successful when he joined LawLytics in late 2012. He was using Scorpion Design for his firm’s websites, and he had a presence on several paid legal directories. Between 2012 and 2016, he invested a significant amount of his own time and effort in developing high-quality content for his LawLytics site, DUI.info.
Over that four year period, DUI.info outperformed all ten of his his non-LawLytics websites combined, and the revenues of his already successful law firm more than doubled. (He subsequently migrated those other sites to the LawLytics platform.)
In Late 2017, he launched an additional new criminal defense website with LawLytics, and that site went from zero traffic at the time of launch, to more than 14,000 visitors who spent an average of nearly 4.5 minutes each on his website in September of 2018.
Richard’s firm followed the LawLytics organic growth formula, which can be expressed as a simple equation:
Content + LawLytics x Time = Success
To Richard, law firm search engine optimization (SEO) doesn’t have to be complicated. Consistently publishing high-quality content is the key to SEO success. While no one knows all the details of Google’s complex search algorithm, one thing is clear to Richard: Google and other search engines try to provide the results that people are looking for. Therefore, websites that provide clear answers to the questions being asked of search engines are more likely to be found in search engine results.
As an example, he points to an article he wrote, “What happens if I miss my court date in the Atlanta Municipal Court?” That article is several years old, but he says it still drives organic search traffic to his website. Says Lawson:
“That’s content that I provided that answers a question that someone had. Some of those people who search for that search term will call me, and if I sound like I’m the right attorney for them, then they might hire me.”
DUI.info now has thousands of pages of high-quality content that continues to drive traffic and client engagement on his website. He says the first hundred or so DUI.info articles were based on common questions he hears in his practice. He also says it can be helpful to look at other attorneys’ websites for inspiration. He knows that copying content is problematic (for many reasons), so he suggests that attorneys just look at the headlines to see what topics are being covered. That way they can avoid copying content from other websites, even accidentally.
Growing a practice does require an investment of time and effort (or an investment of money, if you pay someone to manage your online marketing). It takes time to develop content, and it takes time for a website to develop the search engine ranking and authority that can result in increased visibility in search engine results.
Richard invested effort each week in creating the content that led to the success of DUI.info. As he puts it:
“If you think that you can just put up a website and then don’t do anything with it and expect that people are going to call, that’s not how it works. You have to be committed to participating in your marketing.”
However, he’s never been afraid of putting in the work needed to grow his practice. As a DUI attorney, many of his clients need help on weekends and holidays. As he describes it:
“I don’t control where my business comes from and when a person needs my help…If you’re going to be successful, you have to put yourself out there to be successful. There isn’t an ‘I’m going to be successful but I’m going to take every holiday off.’ It doesn’t work that way. There’s no Labor Day. There’s no Columbus Day. People have hired me on Thanksgiving, people have hired our office the day after Christmas.”
Technology was another part of Richard’s successful marketing equation. Richard began using LawLytics in 2012. He appreciated the ease of using the platform to translate his knowledge and experience into compelling online content:
“LawLytics allows the non-technologically experienced person to simply put up their content and then grow their site.”
NOTE: Richard Lawson started out as a customer of LawLytics. After experiencing significant success using LawLytics, Lawson became a silent investor in the company, and currently holds a minority stake, though he does not participate in the operations of LawLytics.