Module 9 · Launch and get found

Reviews and what to count

Two things left, and both take minutes a week. A review system you can run without creating a problem for yourself — and a way of measuring this website that fits the traffic a small firm actually gets, instead of the traffic a marketing dashboard assumes.

Why reviews are the lever

BrightLocal surveys consumers on this every year. The findings are about local businesses generally, not lawyers specifically, but they are the clearest picture available of the bar a stranger sets before they will call you:

Read those together and the job is clear. It isn’t a perfect average — it is enough reviews, recent enough. Getting from six reviews to twenty-five will do more for a small firm than any redesign of the site you just built. And a wall of glowing reviews that stop in 2023 reads as a practice that stopped getting clients.

Four words that keep the whole system safe

Those four hold up under all three sets of rules that touch this — your state’s professional-conduct rules, Google’s platform policy, and federal trade regulation. Module 6 has the detail and the citations. If you follow the four words, you never need them.

Whom to ask — and whom never to ask

This is where legal parts company with every other business. When a client posts a public review under their own name, they are disclosing that they were your client. That is theirs to disclose, not yours. But in some practices, prompting that disclosure can genuinely harm the person you are asking.

The ask itself

1. Ask in the moment of thanks — at the closing meeting, in the conversation where they say the relieved thing people say when it’s over.
2. Follow with one short message from you, not from an automated system, containing the direct link to your Google profile.
3. Send exactly one follow-up, seven to ten days later. Then stop, forever.
4. Save the review link in your phone right now, so the ask is never blocked by hunting for it.

Draft review request messages I can send to former clients after a matter concludes.

Hard constraints, all four:
- I may not write the review for them, and I may not ask them to include details of their case.
- I may not offer anything at all in exchange — no gift, no discount, no donation.
- I may not filter or gate: no survey that sends happy clients to Google and unhappy ones to my inbox.
- One follow-up maximum.

Produce: (1) a short personal email from me, about 120 words, with a placeholder for the review link;
(2) a text-message version under 300 characters; (3) one non-nagging follow-up for 7-10 days later;
(4) a two-line spoken script for the closing meeting; and (5) a list of the situations in my practice
areas where I should NOT ask at all, thinking specifically about clients for whom being publicly
identified as my client could cause real harm.

Keep every version plain, warm, and free of anything that reads as a promised result.

When a bad one arrives

1. Wait 48 hours. Nothing good has ever been posted by a lawyer in the first hour after reading a one-star review.
2. Check whether it breaks the platform’s rules — a competitor, someone who was never a client, off-topic content, personal information. If it does, report it through Google’s own process, without disclosing anything about any client in the report.
3. If it stands, reply once, or not at all. The safe reply confirms nothing, denies nothing and discloses nothing. National ethics guidance supplies its own wording, which you can use as-is: “Professional obligations do not allow me to respond as I would wish.” Add an invitation to call the office, and stop there. Module 6 has the source and the full protocol.
4. Never a second reply. A thread is worse than a review.
5. Bury it with legitimate volume. Steady genuine reviews are the only real remedy that exists.

Measurement that fits a small practice

Here is the part most marketing courses will not tell you. You will almost certainly never run a valid A/B test — and the arithmetic is not mysterious. At the traffic and conversion rates a small firm actually sees, the standard sample-size math works out to roughly eight to ten thousand visitors per version to detect a realistic improvement at ordinary confidence levels. Ask Claude to run that calculation on your own numbers if you want to watch it happen. A firm getting a few hundred visitors a month would need years to finish a single test, by which point the season, the competition and the search engine have all changed and the result means nothing. Anyone charging you to “test” your headlines at that traffic level is selling you theater.

Two events are worth wiring up properly, and only two. One is a form submission. The other is a tap on your phone number — because roughly 56% of conversions on legal websites are phone calls (Ruler Analytics), and a site that only counts forms will tell you it converts at half its real rate.

Please add Google Analytics 4 to my site. My measurement ID is: [paste it here].

Then mark exactly two things as key events, and nothing else:
1. A successful submission of my consultation request form.
2. A click or tap on any tel: phone link anywhere on the site, including the sticky mobile call bar.

Do NOT add session recording or heatmap tools of any kind — my intake pages must never be recorded.

When you're done, tell me in plain English where in Google Analytics I go to see those two numbers for the
month, then save a snapshot and push it live.

Fifteen minutes, once a month

• Open Google Analytics. Write down one number: total contacts this month (form submissions + phone taps).
• Open your Google Business Profile. Note the review count and the date of the newest one. Answer any new question.
• Ask every client whose matter closed this month — where the practice area allows it.
• Open Search Console. Look for errors and manual actions only. Close it.
• Look at your own response times for the month. If anything took more than an hour, that’s the thing to fix — not the website.
• Pick one page to improve, and tell Claude in one sentence. That’s next month’s work.