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

By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2004 Promotions Unlimited  All rights reserved. 

Your firm made the commitment to finally join the Internet community and had a top 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 answer is that the vast majority of website design companies are not search engine optimization firms.  With most 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 nil.

It is this fact that has given rise to the pay-for-placement/pay-per-click search engine revenue model.  The little know fact of 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.

A recent search on Google for the term ORANGE COUNTY ATTORNEYS found 251,000 results. With only ten organic returned results per page, do you really think a potential client will find your site if it appears on page 23?

The competition for top organic search engine is highly competivative and requires the knowledge and expertise of a specialized firm. There are no quick fixes and many prior techniques that were successful are now considered Spam or manipulation by the search engines and although they still may result in a high placement, this will be short-lived. Once such techniques are detected by search engines, you can expect to have your site banned from the search results, or if you are lucky, your site will just be downgraded to the bottom of any search results.

Let’s see some real world results to prove my point. Taking 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:

Search Positions for www.la-orange-county-lawyers-attorney-directory

For 65 keywords, this directory has 463 page one results on a number of major 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 high 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 2004 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

 We have a great FREE program for 14 legal high traffic reciprocal links pointing to your website....just CLICK HERE!