Dan McDonald, The Daily Record Newswire
While 95 percent of law firms now have a website, not all are getting the biggest bang for their Internet dollars.
If you have a site that no one visits, said Stephen Fairley, the CEO of The Rainmaker Institute, a Gilbert, Ariz. legal marketing company, “it’s just a pretty brochure online.”
The solution is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO is essentially the manipulation of search engines to improve your firm’s ranking in a Google search.
About 90 percent of users do not look beyond the first page of a Google search. More than 60 percent of users will go to one of the top three search results; more than 40 percent will choose the first result, according to Fairley.
Some firms sink tens of thousands of dollars each month into SEO, said Micah Buchdahl, a Moorestown, N.J. attorney who is president of HTMLawyers, Inc., a legal marketing consulting firm. Mid-size to smaller firms typically invest the most money in the practice, he said, particularly criminal defense and personal injury attorneys.
For example, said Buchdahl, attorneys who specialize in litigation over mesothelioma – a cancer caused by asbestos exposure – will pay between $50 and $80 per click to drive consumers searching for “mesothelioma” to their sites.
How it works
How do firms get to the top of the Internet search heap?
According to Fairley, the key is content – fresh content and lots of it.
“Content is not just king. It’s king, queen, jack and ace,” he said.
Blogs often provide the best kind of content for SEO purposes, said Sharon Nelson, a lawyer and president of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., a Fairfax, Va. forensics and legal technology corporation.
“A blog is the best Google juice you can have,” she said.
LaSheita Sayer, chief marketing officer for Denver-based ZoZo Marketing Group, agreed.
Another form of content that can work well for SEO, according to Nelson, is online videos.
Sayer said that Google and its search algorithm prefer sites that use a mix of media, such as images, PDF files and video. When a video is loaded on YouTube, its content can be transcribed and stored within the video as captions. These captions should contain key words like the law firm’s name, said Sayer.
Links from other websites that steer users to your site can be helpful, said Fairley.
But reciprocal linking, where sites simply trade links, won’t help boost a firm’s ranking in the search engine indices, he said.
It’s important to consider the phrasing consumers will use to search for an attorney.
For example, said Sayer, “They might not search for ‘medical malpractice attorney.’ They might search for ‘attorney to sue doctor.’ Those are the types of terms that Google and Yahoo use.”
Mark A. Jacobsen, senior director for strategic development at FindLaw, said law firms have a tendency to be fixated on the ranking of “pet search” phrases, striving to be in the top five or top 10 for a specific phrase.
But he said such rankings can be overrated.
“The vast majority of queries that end with a certain law firm are from unique or long tail searches” – lengthier, very specific inquiries, such as “Child custody attorneys in Texas,” said Jacobsen.
What it costs
The key to maximizing your SEO, said Buchdahl, is to keep tinkering with the coding on your site, based on the factors driving searches.
Those factors change over time, he said.
Last year, he said, everyone was chasing locality. Firms wanted to establish where they were based and what communities they were trying to serve. Now, said Buchdahl, there is less focus on locality, although that is still an important factor, and the emphasis is on making sure the site is compatible with mobile devices.
Firm size, he said, isn’t the driving factor in SEO spending. A bare-bones pay-per-click campaign for a practice in a “mid-level metro area” would likely cost about $1,000 per month, said Buchdahl. (Pay per click refers to the practice of buying ads that will appear among the search engine results.)
An overall marketing program, including development, hosting, licensing and an organic SEO campaign for a firm in a market like Philadelphia or Boston is likely to cost between $5,000 and $10,000 annually, he said.
At the end of the day, said Buchdahl, cash rules when it comes to SEO.
“I can do all the blog posts and Facebook posts I want, [but] if the guy next door is paying $100k on SEO, none of the traffic is going to trickle down to me,” he said.
