Most law firms know their practice areas. Essentially, most are higher volume, lower price returns with one big exception: personal injury.
Which model are you? A low-volume, high-dollar personal injury firm, a firm specializing in a high-volume, steady-revenue practice area, or a catch-all general practice firm? If you are general practice, do you want to make the investment in competing for injury?
The answers to these questions have a couple of different implications on your SEO strategies, but more importantly on your projected revenue and ROI.
High Volume Cases Drive Regular Revenue
High volume practice areas drive regular revenue. Particularly if you have a wide range of practice areas. Some firms choose to specialize in one -- say, for example, a firm positioning themselves as a bankruptcy firm. However, it is possible to have many different lines in the water, each capable of catching fish quite regularly.
If you have the talent in your firm to handle a variety of practice areas, targeting each simply brings more opportunity to your firm.
The phases of your SEO campaign may stay the same (early, mid, late and end-game), but you shouldn’t have the same lag between projected revenue and actuals that a PI-only firm does. Successful SEO will begin to drive actual revenue much faster. ROI is still dependent on volume, which is why specializing in multiple higher-volume practice areas can be more lucrative than simply focusing on one.
That said, if your firm has chosen to be exclusively bankruptcy, for example, it still pays to be the top result.
Low Volume, High Impact Injury Cases
Firms that go all-in on personal injury law are 100% focused on building a large stack of open cases. The payout takes time, but they’re looking at success over time, not immediately.
After all, a bankruptcy attorney on a low flat fee would have to file 9 or more bankruptcies every day of of the work week, 50 weeks a year to have a 7-figure year. A PI attorney can do that on a single case, or by having a number of small to medium-sized cases close in a year.
Most PI firms are established, so there are open cases in your books at the get-go. So long as you can front the cash with the right long-term approach to payout, great SEO will increase your open cases and start delivering some big cases.
Blended Firms
As we have said, the more high-volume practice areas a general practice firm can produce, the more you are going to generate leads on a regular basis. However, if you position your firm to be truly general practice and want to add competitive injury SEO to your campaign, you have some advantages that PI-only firms don’t.
First, you have the regular revenue that stabilizes your firm’s monthly gross. You have more opportunity to reflect revenue and bring you closer to becoming In The Black and generating profit.
Secondly, there is a bit of a double-edged sword regarding your ability to rank competitively with PI-only firms.
Google will know that a PI-only firm is focused solely on injury. Google will see that website as an authority on injury. Oftentimes the people who are known amongst the legal community as the big PI lawyers are ranking on the top of the PI search rankings, but sometimes they aren’t.
On the flip-side, it is possible to establish your general practice firm in the PI space. It can be situational, but Google doesn’t know what reputation different firms have within the legal community. If the people who are ranking in PI are a surprise, then the injury space may be open. It is possible to devise an overtake strategy to quietly position your firm to bag those lower volume cases that add significant chunks of change to your annual revenue.
Commit a Campaign to a Model
No matter which model you have built your practice on, making a commitment up-front before beginning a campaign is critical.
Smaller firms or startup firms may simply change their preferences mid-stream, and that’s fine. In the end, it’s our job as SEO experts to do what you want.
However, committing to a model up-front and sticking with it is more likely to provide you the best ROI. At a minimum, changing your firm’s model prior to beginning a campaign at least focuses the time and effort of your campaign around what you truly want. Changing mid-stream means much time and effort was spent creating value that disappears immediately when you remove practice areas.
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