Lawyer Advertising Blog

Lawyer Advertising, Marketing, TV, Radio, Billboards, Internet, 1-800 Vanity Phone Numbers & Ethics

How Clients Search on the Internet

By Leave a Comment

Potential clients are searching for lawyers on the Internet using longtail keywords. FindLaw found that longtail keyword searches where someone was looking for a lawyer accounted for 32% of all searches.  67% were less valuable research queries using regular keywords, such as “DUI laws in Texas”.

What’s the difference between a regular keyword, keyword phrase or Longtail keyword? A keyword could be “lawyer” while a keyword phrase could be “personal injury lawyer” or “Dallas personal injury lawyer”. FindLaw refers to this as a Head-Term query.

A longtail keyword is much longer and likely includes information pertaining to the searcher’s circumstances, such as “lawyer for drunk motorcyclist hit by a car in Dallas”.

Longtail keyword phrases are more valuable for a law firm because someone typing in a search like that is looking to hire a lawyer. This is just an example but before you think that you don’t want a drunk motorcyclist as a client, I recently obtained six figures for one.

Trying to rank for keywords is a waste of money. Somebody landing on a website who searched for “lawyer” or “attorney” is not the potential client you’re trying to attract. A lot of money is spent by law firms trying to rank for keyword phrases but this requires a costly investment and produces fewer potential clients. FindLaw found that only 1% of a law firm’s website traffic was accounted by short keyword phrases.

The problem with searches using research queries is that a lot of these people are not looking to hire a lawyer. FindLaw found that 71 percent of a law firm’s contacts come from long-tail queries; 26 percent from research queries; and only 3 percent from head-term queries.

Download the FindLaw white paper The Futility of Chasing Silver Bullets analyzing search-generated traffic to thousands of law firm websites.

This research isn’t surprising and can be found in many articles on the Internet about every kind of business, not just attorneys. Fortunately, it’s much easier to compete against other lawyers for longtail keyword searches that it is for shorter keywords or keyword phrases.

If you are now interested in focusing on longtail keyword phrases and wondering how to do that, the answer is in writing informative blog articles. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time that most lawyers don’t want to spend.

I occasionally find a law firm’s website which has a substantial amount of informative articles. This is sometimes the result of a lawyer who likes to write a lot and sometimes a law firm with several attorneys each contributing articles or where one attorney is assigned to write articles.

 

 

Bing & Google – Search Engine Evolution

By 2 Comments

Bing is now using Facebook data to display websites your friends have “liked”.  This is influencing the ranking of the search engine listing results in a way that is personal to you and will display results on the first page which could previously have been several pages deeper.

If you don’t want to see results liked by your friends, you can avoid using this feature by simply not signing into Facebook.  But I suspect the people you want to reach will be using it.

I was thinking a long time ago that if I owned Facebook, I would develop a search engine to correlate search results with sites that friends like.  Although this is not something that I would like in a search engine that I use, I think this is good for Facebook and a good search engine niche.

Google has also transitioned from a really good search engine that I liked using to a yellow page type site with local listings that I don’t like.   When I want local search results, I go to a yellow page site.  With the Google and Bing transitions from a traditional search engine, this leaves the door wide open for a new search engine to take Google’s original place.

With Google and now Bing moving away from traditional search results, this will have a significant impact on search engine optimization aimed at appearing in the top natural search results and will spawn a new direction in search engine optimization.