Saturday, November 9, 2013

Law Firm SEO: Organic Search Results Win Over Paid Search!

New reports and studies have just come out to confirm what the law firm search engine optimization specialist here at Legal Marketing Advantage have been talking about for a while now; organic search results outperform paid searches. If you have been involved in law firm marketing (online) in a big market for the past year or so you may have also noticed this fact. Organic over paid search turns out to not only be true in the legal field, but in most fields now a days as well.

The new study was done by User Centric and proved without a doubt the increasing importance of SEO for not only Law Firms but all businesses that want to gain business online. User Centric used their eye tracking study technology to look at leading search engines Google and Bing through the eyes of their users. The study results found that one hundred percent of people in the study looked at the organic search results on both Google and Bing search engines. That was in comparison to the right-hand paid search ads where only 28% and 21% of participants glanced at these on Google and on Bing (respectively).

To top it off the users not only focused on organic search results more often, versus paid search results, the users spent significantly longer times viewing results of organic search versus the paid search results. This means that search engine users are learning to overlook the paid ads more and more as the majority of online users become more search savvy.

So how should this affect your online law firm marketing? Well first off it means your SEO efforts will be more important than ever and can gain more results for your firm. The fact is it takes longer and takes a more serious effort to rank well on the major search engines like Google and Bing through organic efforts but the pay off in the long run will be much more beneficial. Now does this mean that pay per click (PPC) is dead? Not even close.

Even with these results the top three paid ads can get a lot of action BUT the cost in the main legal areas can be outrageous. The cost and return on investment are going to vary greatly on what market you are after and what portion of law you want to focus on. Some PPC campaigns can still be very successful if a law firm online marketing company really knows what they are doing. The on the other hand if PPC prices are dirt cheap maybe consumers just are not looking for those particular terms.

So if your firm has not already done so, your online efforts need to focus on organic search results. It can take some time depending on where your site is at right now, but with a solid steady game plan, the time and effort put in your SEO can bring in huge results for your law firm.

No comments:

Post a Comment