If five businesses in your town do what you do, a customer shopping around will probably open all five websites. What makes them pick yours? Lem Garcia, a personal injury attorney in the Los Angeles area, gave me two answers when he was on Unscripted SEO: get the reviews before everyone else does, and don’t let someone else write your content without you.
Law is a crowded local market, which is why his answers carry over to almost any small business. Here’s what you can take from it.
Find the gap your competitors haven’t filled yet
When Lem opened his practice in 2014, he looked at the firms around him and noticed they had few reviews on Yelp or Google. So he went all in on it. His method was simple: do a good job, then consistently ask clients to leave a review.
“And that was really what made me have the capacity to build the practice where it is today, is to focus in on the reviews before everybody else was doing it.”
The lesson isn’t “get reviews.” Everyone knows that now. The lesson is that he spotted what his market wasn’t doing and did it first. Today every firm collects reviews, and Lem calls it a “really big arms race.” Your market has its own version of 2014 reviews somewhere. It might be video, a Bing listing, or answering the phone on the first ring.
If reviews are still your gap, here’s how to get more Google reviews as a small business. And keep them real. Lem’s biggest challenge of the last five years has been competing with reviews that “may not always be left by previous clients.” His own rule is to do it properly so the business lasts.
Copying your competitors makes you invisible
Lem’s read on most local businesses: they look at what others in their field are doing and emulate it. You should look at what they’re doing. Then do something a little bit different, because the customer comparing five sites needs a reason to stop on yours.
Volume content is where the copying gets automated. If you hire a company that’s going to crank out content for ten businesses this month, Lem said, “all that content is going to be very similar.” You end up with a site that reads like your competitors’ sites, because it was written the same way, often by the same people.
You don’t have to write it, but you have to be in the room
Here’s Lem’s fix, and I think it’s right:
“But if you’re writing the content yourself or you have a lot of sit-down meetings with the writer, then you’ll be able to have content that does stand out to the potential customers.”
You can actually do this in an hour a month. Before your writer starts, tell them:
- the questions customers really ask you on the phone
- the thing you do differently, in your words
- a story from a real job (one you’re allowed to share) that shows how you work
- what you’d never say, so it doesn’t end up on your site
That’s the part AI and volume shops can’t fake. It’s the same problem Greg Merrilees and I got into on websites and the AI sameness problem.
Show up where your community already is
Lem’s firm also does booths at the mall, at running events and at local schools, and sponsors a scholarship that gets listed by colleges. Not every small business can fund a scholarship. Almost every one can sponsor a youth team or show up at a fun run. Lem’s point was simple: when the community has an event, be a presence there, and then fill your website with content that targets your local area.
Don’t be the buggy whip company
We ended on AI. Lem doesn’t use AI tools at his firm yet, and he’s watching closely. His view of where it goes was the most quotable line of the episode: “Instead of a bubble bursting, it’s gonna be a bubble exploding and just taking over.” And his reminder that when the car arrived, the horse and carriage companies said it’d be fine. “What happened to them?”
So which gap in your market is still open, and how long before your competitors notice it? Listen to my full conversation with Lem Garcia to hear how he thinks about it.
This article is about marketing, not legal advice.