murphy.mason•1mo agoMost Upvoted

Heard a partner say SEO is dead and almost choked on my coffee

Was sitting in on a meeting at a firm near Jasper Ave yesterday and one of the senior partners goes 'SEO is dead, we should just dump money into billboards'. I literally had to bite my tongue. Like dude, 60% of our leads come from organic search and you want to throw that away? I get that trends shift but calling it dead is wild. Has anyone else had to deal with older lawyers who think digital marketing is a fad?

4 comments

4 Comments

rose_reed1mo ago

Google ain't a trillion dollar company because people are just browsing around for fun" - actually that's exactly why they're a trillion dollar company. If no one searched, there'd be no ads to sell.

ruby_henderson361mo ago

Yeah @rose_reed hit it. People forget search is basically Google's whole business model. If you've got an SEO plan that actually tracks leads instead of just vanity metrics, it pays for itself pretty quick.

matthewdixon1mo ago

Maybe you could pull up some data from your firm's own analytics dashboard showing organic lead conversion rates. Seriously, cold hard numbers usually shut down that "SEO is dead" talk pretty fast. Show them the cost per lead from organic vs. billboards, that math is usually a knockout punch lol. And honestly, "dead" is just a buzzword people throw around when they don't understand how to track results properly. If it was dead Google wouldn't still be a trillion dollar company off the back of search ads and organic results.

gibson.avery1mo ago

Tbh my analytics dashboard is basically just a screensaver at this point, I stare at it hoping the numbers magically go up. But @matthewdixon is right, the cold hard numbers on cost per lead from organic versus traditional stuff usually makes the "SEO is dead" crowd go quiet real fast. Been in rooms where someone says SEO is dead and I just show them the organic traffic from last month, that usually does the trick. Google ain't a trillion dollar company because people are just browsing around for fun.