If you’re thinking about using a website as a way to get clients on the internet, if you’re thinking about starting your new law firm and you like me are using a website and using organic search, meaning that people are going to put searches into an LLM or they’re going to run a Google search and they’re going to find your website, the number one thing that you need to understand. If you want to go ahead and pursue that path of marketing, and frankly, I think if you’re anything like me, if you are a business to business lawyer, if you serve as businesses, you don’t go after the consumer market. My practice as a small law firm owner is no different than my practice as it was at the large law firm where I was a partner. The number one thing that you need to understand is that you can’t just throw up a website and expect that an LLM or Google is going to even have any idea that it’s out there.

There is an entire backend of websites where it looks like the cockpit of the space shuttle. And there are so many different knobs and dials that you can twist and turn. And unless this is what you do, unless you are an expert in optimizing websites so that they are visible to the LLMs and visible to Google, you should not play around under that hood. I have done my fair share of playing around back in the day. I did plenty of damage. But the main point is just that there are people that need to flip switches on on the back end of your website to even make it be visible to Google. Google does not have supernatural abilities to see every single website that’s out there. And frankly, Google is not interested in paying attention to every website that’s out there because Google is interested in paying attention to the websites that are likely to be things that its customers are going to be interested in so its customers stick around and so that Google can make advertising revenue.

And so Google wants to find the good websites. They want to find the content rich websites. And so if the backend of your website is so prehistoric that you haven’t even invested in a consultant that’s going to flip on the switches on the backend that is going to send the signals to Google that the website even exists, then Google won’t even know that you’re out there. And there’s a lot more to it on each page. There are different tags, H1 tags, H2 tags and so on, title tags where people who are SEOs, people who specialize in search engine optimization are going to make sure that what is sitting in the title tag or the H1 tag position is descriptive. And it sends a signal to Google about what the page is about. And there’s a lot more that goes into it than that. There’s all kinds of code that can be embedded like on the backend of a page that will send the right kind of signal to Google that questions can be answered.

There are question and answer, little snippets of texts that can be put in there that attract Google’s attention. And Google, I mean, who even knows how many websites there are out there? But I mean, it’s way more than anybody could ever create something like Google and expect that they would have complete visibility into every website. And so you’ve got to make it easy for Google. You have to have the backend sending the right signals to Google. You have to make sure that Google comes and it crawls your website and it indexes the website because if it doesn’t do that, it doesn’t even know what your website’s about. And so my website, which is now been around for eight years, is the product of a ton of effort from me. I’ve got hundreds of videos, I’ve got going on 500 pages, and every single page is sending a signal out into the universe.

It’s speaking to Google in the code that Google can understand. The people that run my website are making sure that I’m not writing one page that is going to compete with another page because I don’t want both of those pages to compete with each other and wind up on the fifth page of the search results. I want to merge them in a way such that they’ve got the equity so that they wind up on the first page of the results. And so you can’t just throw up a website and think that like Google or the LLMs are going to magically find it. I could tell you that the amount of money that I’ve poured into my website over eight years is staggering. It is the second most expensive thing that I’ve ever bought in my life. And after my house, I have poured way more money into my website than it costs me to go to law school.

And I went to a private law school and I borrowed my way all the way through. And so this is a game that never ends. It’s a firefight that is being waged from day-to-day, week to week, month to month. You don’t necessarily have to make the level of investment that I’ve made right now when you’re starting your website in order for it to be something that is useful for you. But don’t just throw up a website and think people are going to find it. You minimally need to go find somebody who has some skill with search engine optimization that is going to make sure that it’s being indexed, that it’s being crawled, that the backend is sending the signals that say, “There’s a website here that you should pay attention to. ” And you need to be concerned with, is it mobile friendly or does it look bad on a cell device?

How fast does it load? I mean, there are so many different parts of the SEO art, and this is Black Magic, this is a dark art. The people who understand this stuff, they don’t have day jobs. This is all that they do. And I believe that the future of my law firm, my entire marketing plan on a going forward basis, other than LinkedIn and video, which I like, is to have an awesome website that performs well organically, meaning that people are going to ask ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever a question and Gemini is going to say this website right here, or someone’s going to do a Google search and Google is going to say, Jeremy’s website has the answer for you. And if you do not have people that are doing the work on the backend to make sure that you are visible, then you will be invisible.

So don’t just throw up a website and wait for people to break down your door. You don’t need to make this sort of investment that I made to get started, but you’ve got to find somebody. And there are very inexpensive people out there. There are lots of freelancers out there that are going to be able to do this for you. There’s a lot of people also out there that are going to sell you a lot of snake oil here. So discerning who’s real and who’s not is an important thing, but don’t just throw up a website and wait for your phone to ring. You have to throw up a website and then make sure that somebody that knows what they’re doing is taking care of the backend so that it is evident to the LLMs and to Google that your website even exists.