What kind of revenue is your website generating for your law firm? If your answer is “not enough,” then you may want to learn more about how website marketing actually works for small-niche firms like yours in estate planning or elder law.
Two of the top challenges of website marketing, particularly for niche firms, are traffic and visibility. Your website won’t drive new business to your law firm if the right people – your target audience – do not see it. And they will not see it if they cannot find it. Search engine optimization is the process of making sure your website can be found – quickly and easily – by people who are looking for your service and are likely to choose you (they are within driving distance of your office). So, you will want to optimize your website for local search, to be certain that people within your market area find you first when they go online to search for an estate planning or elder law attorney.
How much traffic will local search optimization drive to your website?
You should not depend on SEO alone to drive sufficient volume to your website to truly impact your law firm’s bottom line. Why not? Because the traffic on your small-niche search terms is relatively low. Sometimes so low that the major traffic estimation tools will not even track them. This does not mean these terms are not used, it just means that in the global economy of the internet, the “big boys” like Google won’t expend resources to track them. Why not?
Follow the money. Google tracks keyword traffic for only one reason – to sell those keywords in pay-per-click campaigns. In fact, their Traffic Estimator is really a tool for designing pay-per-click campaigns. The Traffic Estimator tells you how much you should bid on a search string, and gives you an approximation of what your campaign would cost each month. Low-volume keywords and search strings are dropped out of the auction – and you won’t even get a traffic estimate if Google doesn’t see your campaign as profitable – to THEM. Remember, a click-through on your low-volume keyword(s) is practically worthless to Google. Google does not really care that this highly-qualified prospect might be worth $2,500, $4,500 or $10,000 to you!
We recently optimized a client website for local search, focusing on terms like “estate planning attorney,” and “elder law attorney” combined with our client’s city and state. For example, “estate planning attorney overland park ks.” We tracked his website statistics over the past four months, and this is what we found:
1. Site traffic jumped from an average of 70 visits per month in October to an average of 700 visits per month in November, December and January!
Google’s Traffic Estimator would not have predicted this traffic increase. When I check the Estimator, it still says that traffic is too low to estimate for his keywords. Yet, we optimized his website for local search, and his traffic jumped 900%!
2. Top search terms bringing visitors to the site included his CITY + “probate attorney,” “elder law attorney,” “estate planning attorney,” and “estate planning lawyer.” Note: When I run Google’s Traffic Estimator for these terms in his city, Google tells me there is not enough traffic to measure.
3. So, how do we get these results? We do not rely solely on SEO to drive traffic to your website. We use a well-orchestrated marketing system. Your optimized website is the hub of the system, but is integrated with and supported by smoothly operating systems that include both inbound and outbound marketing.
Think about this – if your website attracts 700 qualified visitors each and every month … if your website is properly designed to extend those visits into ongoing with relationships … if your website converts a mere one percent of those visitors into initial consultations … how would that impact your revenue?
Let’s do the math. (We have a handy conversion calculator on our website you can use to check your own numbers.) We will use conservative numbers. 700 visitors, an average fee of $2,500, and a one percent conversion rate … would mean $17,500 in new revenue to your law firm monthly.
Now, as a true marketing professional, I would tweak those numbers down a bit. Consider a one percent conversion rate, and seven calls to your office monthly. Let’s say half of those are not truly qualified, as may sometimes happen. So, you get three to four initial consults per month from your website. That’s one per week, on average. Most of you say you close 90 to 100 percent of the people you see in your office, but let’s say you close only 50 percent of these people. That’s two new clients per month, with an average fee (on the low side) of $2,500 per client. That’s $5,000 per month of new revenue – revenue you would not otherwise have had – generated by your website.
Five thousand dollars per month is a pretty good head start every month, right? Wouldn’t that take a pretty good bite out of your overhead?
We will show you how to get results like these at our Spring Practice Development Workshop. Sign up now for just $595 (through March 1st). Visit our website for complete details. You can register online, or just call James at 1-877-352-2021, ext. 0 and he can take care of you over the phone.
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