Law Firm Marketing | Reader Questions

I love getting questions from readers for two reasons. First, it lets me know that people are actually reading this stuff. Second, it gives me a bunch of things to talk about. Last week, I had the pleasure of talking to Rod over email. He had some helpful information for me and asked a couple of questions about law firm marketing. I thought this would be a great place to answer them. So, here we go.

His questions were about search engine optimization, also known as SEO. They were:

1. How many calls a week do you get from search engines?

2. How many clients?

3. How long did it take you to rank high?

4. I have an attorney with 3000 backlinks to his page. I'm sure he used an SEO company from India, because most of the links are blog comments and are senseless. Is this something I can overcome on my own, or should I hire an SEO company to spam blogs?

All great questions. Here are the answers.

Calls Per Week From Search Engines

I have to admit I don't know the precise number of calls I get from the search engines. It is something I am just starting to keep track of (which is dumb - I should have been doing this a long time ago). And, before I get too far, I'll tell you a little bit about how my stuff is set up. First, I have my "law firm website." It is the name of my firm and has all of my email addresses and everything. I've also set it up to have the landing page for my criminal defense marketing efforts.

After that I have a website devoted specifically to traffic tickets and a website devoted specifically to DUI. I do this for a couple of reasons. First, the sites are tailored to what the clients are looking for, which will hopefully result in more qualified clients that reach each of the site. Second, it lets the search engines know specifically what my site is about. Don't know if it makes a big difference, but it can't hurt.

Although I don't know how many calls I get per week (I'll tell you my ballpark average here in a couple of minutes) I do know how many people are visiting the site. I've installed Google analytics on each of my sites (and you should too) and it gives me a bunch of handy information, including where the people went on the site, how long they were there, and what keywords they used to find me if they came from the search engines.

Last month the traffic site got 174 visits, 397 page views, 2.28 pages per visit, an average visitor time of 2 minutes on the site, 88% of the visits were new visits, and there was a 55% bounce rate (people left after looking at only the first page). If you just divide the visitors by 4, that means there are about 38 visitors per week (I used 88% of the number above because I check the site every once in a while and didn't want to count that). Of the 38 visitors I'll get about 5-10 calls per week. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned in these numbers. First, the bounce rate, while high, isn't terrible when we are talking about traffic tickets. If people get to the first page and call me I'm okay with that. Second, even though I'm only getting about 33% of calls from people that visit my page (and the numbers are actually probably lower than that), I'm okay with that too. A lot of people searching out traffic tickets are looking for ways to do it themselves. I give them a lot of information on the site so if they are just looking for a do-it-yourself they won't call me and bother me with a lot of questions. It's pre-screening in a way.

Of those 5-10 calls, I probably sign up about 75% or so.

For the DUI site I had 246 visits, 774 page views, 3.15 pages per visit, average visitor time of 2:53, 75% of the visits were new visits, and there was a 49.59% bounce rate. Dividing by four, there are approximately 46 visits per week. Of those 46 visits, I probably only get 5 calls a week. Of those I'll typically sign up 50% (though as I write those numbers up I know they don't add up because I am not signing up 2 people a week).

The information here is actually more interesting than the traffic, and shows me exactly where my problems lie. Getting people to the site is fine. 46 visits per week is great. Where I am losing out big time is getting people to take the next step and pick up the phone. There are a lot of people just looking for information here too, but the majority of these people will end up with a lawyer. If I can figure out how to get them to take the next step my business will skyrocket.

Sadly, I don't have numbers for the criminal site. Something to put on the to-do list! I typically get one or two phone calls a week about non-DUI criminal matters (my marketing for this area though is not an emphasis).

Client Calls

I've pretty much already answered this. We're looking at maybe 10 calls a week or so, with fluctuations from week to week (I will literally have some weeks with 2 calls and some weeks with 20 calls). For me, this isn't an SEO or internet marketing issue, per se, it's a call to action problem. I need to figure out how to get people to go from the internet to my office better. It's definitely a goal of mine.

How Long Did it Take You To Rank High?

This is a loaded question. Timing depends on many factors. I would say the two key factors related to timing are the work you put in to help Google find you and the competitiveness of your keywords.

First, the work you put into it. The way that Google is set up, they want to have the searchers query answered in the first couple of search results. For example, if I search Google for "how to make 2 foot putts" (this is for my brother in law, not for me) Google wants to make sure your query is answered at the top.

There aren't enough people in the world to read and review every website AND rank them for specific searches, so Google has put together a computer program to do it. The basics of the program are this - Google looks at the content of the site and the links that go to and from the site to find out what the site is about, then Google looks at the links that are coming from your site to determine how much "authority" your site has. Authority, for purposes of this post, I would define as the likelihood that your site would answer a search query.

There are ways to help your site build authority with links, but it MUST BE DONE THE RIGHT WAY. I'll talk a lot more about this when I answer the last question, but to summarize, the best way to help Google understand how good your site is is to write articles related to your practice area and then link them back to your site. You can do this on your blog or on article submissions sites such as ezine articles, goarticles, squidoo, and hubpages. You cannot duplicate content. Google will know. You cannot steal content. Google will know. Article writing tells Google that you know what you are talking about and helps your site build authority.

Now, the second part, competitiveness. I'm pretty sure DUI attorney and it's related keywords are some of the most competitive in the legal world (bankruptcy and personal injury are probably up there too). That means you've got a lot of people trying to get into one or two spots. It took me about a year to get to number one for my local search terms (location plus your keyword - San Diego DUI attorney for example). Now that I'm number one though I expect to be there forever. I'm not number one yet for DUI attorney, but I'm getting close. In fact, if you Google DUI attorney anywhere in the world I should show up on the first page (that fact isn't that important, I just think it's kind of cool).

My traffic site took me about 4 weeks to get to number one. It's much less competitive. Plus I did a ton of work on them both, and still do (when you first start out you can either sit by the phone and make it ring or get out there and do something to make it ring).

Hiring SEO and Blog Comments

Here's the thing about hiring an SEO company - it just doesn't work that well. And the one's that do work well are going to be expensive. One important question to ask anyone that is trying to sell you on SEO is whether or not they are going to get you ranked in the organic results, the map results, or the ad results. If they say anything other than organic, in my opinion you are wasting your time.

And if they say organic, I'd ask for a detailed explanation of what they are going to do, and if they even utter the words "blog comments" I would hang up and start looking elsewhere.

Blog comments, and comments in general don't work for SEO purposes. If you want to get into an engaged discussion and let people know where it's coming from, do it. But don't leave a bunch of junk in someone's comment box with a link thinking Google didn't long ago find a way to completely eliminate that factor from its ranking algorithm. And, by the way, if any question about doing something ever includes the words "spam" the answer is no. Kind of like if the question involves the word "fraud." It's just not going to work out in the end.

And, there's another consequence to using these people - you don't get to control the message. And, while that might not seem like a big deal, it can have far reaching consequences (see here). I don't do it, but there are some people that expose comment spammers for what they are. And they don't just write a blog post, they've got some knowledge like I do. The effect of the exposure is the search results start showing some of these posts, making you look like a fool.

Slow and steady wins the race. To answer your question, this is something you can easily overcome.

Hope this helped everyone out. Have any questions or comments? Let me know. I'm always looking for something new to write about!