While the big picture of law firm SEO is to simply be the best, because that’s what Google wants, this has a fundamental implication to law firm SEO: it is relative to your competition.
This is going to be a relatively brief article, but it is worth its own attention, since it is a critically important element to creating a return on your SEO investment.
Competition Research
We cover this in greater depth alter, but this is part of why all successful law firm SEO campaigns begin with research.
It is possible to objectively determine who your competitors are on your primary keyword objectives -- these are the people who are currently being rewarded with page one and rank one positions for each keyword.
SEO is a zero-sum game. If you want that rank one position, you’re going to have to take it at someone else’s expense. It is serious business, and flying blind without a real plan or any research is very risky.
Importance to ROI
If you had a dollar for every spam email, paper mail, cold calls to your receptionist or solicitor showing up at your law firm selling websites and SEO, I’m sure you could probably go ahead and retire. They’re everywhere and are completely happy to sell you a pile of useless crap for whatever price they can weasel out of you.
I’ve seen a law firm drop $100,000 on a website where they were promised SEO long-term. They had just settled a big case and wanted to drop $100k in cold hard cash before the year’s end. This big brand name service company that’s ubiquitous in the legal industry took that $100k, and continued to charge a pretty premium monthly for the next five years. Their firm was never doing better than page 5 on Google rankings.
he “sunk cost effect” is a cognitive bias that makes it difficult to cut one’s losses and move on to a better approach. “But I spent a quarter million on my website, why should I have to turn around and spend money with someone else to get rankings?” It’s an understandable conflict, and the deal never went through, but they never generated much revenue and certainly didn’t go In The Black on their SEO investment.
This illustrates the point that the research that goes into determining keywords and competitors and a long-term plan for success is to really dial in what it takes, then consider the costs. In this law firm’s case, they just wanted to dump money into it, ostensibly expecting near-term tax advantages and long-term payoffs when the website began to succeed, which it never did.
It’s difficult to create ROI when you’ve dumped $100k on a project on day 1 of a contract. Especially when the long-term monthly was still pretty high.
Part of the ROI formula is the cost basis. Throwing too much money at the project simply creates a higher bar to go In The Black and begin seeing a profit from your investment.
Intrepid.Marketing’s Approach
We project a fee for our clients after we do our research. We are the experts, and we make the gamble on the long-term retainer. If it’s not enough, guess what: we are still the only one in the industry with a money-back guarantee. We have to make the rankings, or we’re out a lot of cash.
For the customer, this means you know we’re not going to turn around and nickel-and-dime you for more cash if we aren’t getting the rankings we want. It allows you to know exactly what your cost basis is of your SEO investment, so that you can start tracking your ROI projections without worrying about having to move the expense needle unexpectedly in the future.
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Next Chapter: The Importance of Law Firm Keywords and Practice Areas