What it takes to drive high quality traffic to your legal website

By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2007 Promotions Unlimited All rights reserved.

Your firm made the commitment to finally join the Internet community and had a professional web design firm create a really good looking website. Now after a year or so, you’re wondering not only why you’re not getting any new clients from your site, but also why your site’s traffic is unimpressive.

The response is that the vast majority of website design companies are not search engine optimization firms. With the majority of major search engines returning about ten websites per page on a given keyword search, basically, if your site is not within the first three pages of returned results, your site’s effectiveness as a new client generator is zero.

It is this fact that has given rise to the pay-for-placement/pay-per-click search engine revenue model. An interesting fact about buying ‘sponsored’ or ‘featured’ positions is that it is generally acknowledged that upwards of 50% of the web surfers will skip over these listings in favor of the ‘organic’ listings.

Recently, a search on Google for the phrase ORANGE COUNTY ATTORNEYS found 251,000 results. With only ten organic returned results per page, what are the chances that a potential client will find your site if it appears on page 23?

The competition for top organic search engine is fierce and requires the knowledge and expertise of a specialized firm. There are no simple solutions and many old techniques that were once successful are now considered Spam or manipulation by the search engines and although they still may result in a high placement, this will only be temporary. Once such techniques are downgraded to the bottom of any search results.

Let’s see some real search results to prove my point. Using the keyword phrase ORANGE COUNTY ATTORNEYS, and just looking at page one returned search engine results, below is how our LA/Orange County legal directory ranked:

For 65 keywords, this directory has 463 page one results on a number of key search engines. This is what drives our targeted traffic. For July 2004 we had 3,036 unique visitors to just this directory.

The most cost effective strategy for most legal firms is to join with firms like ours, which specialize in top search engine placement, for city specific legal key words, through directory style websites. As shown above, the bottom line is top placement for legal keyword phrases that are likely to be used by potential new clients seeking legal assistance.

Copyright 2007 Promotions Unlimited. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited http://www.websitetrafficbuilders.com an Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas) publisher and search engine placement technology analyst. You can contact Bob via e-mail at seo711@gmail.com or visit his San Diego legal directory at: www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com