About the Authors: This survey and corresponding write-up were
executed by SEO strategists Matt Green (@mchuckgreen) and John Van Bockern (@johnevanbockern) from Ethical SEO Consulting.

As is common on legal websites, The Reeves Law Group has invested heavily in video production. That has led to us to ask the question: Should law firms be creating videos to supplement informational website content?

 

Our previous research indicates that authorship snippets in search results are more effective at increasing CTR’s than video snippets for transactional legal search queries like “Car Accident Lawyer”. These findings sparked many related questions, one being whether the results would change for keyword searches with legal relevance, but which are more informational in nature.

 

Our hypothesis was that results containing video snippets would be clicked on at a greater rate than in our previous study, but that authorship snippets would still provide the greatest positive increase. Our findings shed light onto user’s preferred medium for digesting legally relevant information which will help attorneys, and their marketing teams, make more informed choices regarding video creation, and implementation, for long-tail optimized informational content.

 

Methodology:

 

Test Keyword Phrase: “car insurance claim denied”

 

Prompt: Your insurance provider has denied your auto insurance claim. You want to find more information so you perform a Google search for “car insurance claim denied”. Which result do you click first?

 

Control Image:

Control Results:

 

Control Numbers:

Author Image:

Author Results:

Author Numbers:

Video Image:

 

Video Results:

 

Video Numbers:

Author — Video Image:

Author — Video Results:

 

Author — Video Numbers:

Video — Author Image:

Video — Author Results:

Video — Author Numbers:

Conclusions:

 

After taking a look at the numbers, it is apparent that authorship snippets are much more effective at increasing CTR than video snippets in both a transactional queries and informational queries as well. It can even be asserted that video snippets actually deter CTR. Enough of our conclusions, though, the numbers speak for themselves.

 

Last week, I saw a post from AJ Kohn on a concept that Google uses to determine search success called “time to long click”  The concept is this:

“A long click occurs when a user performs a search, clicks on a result and remains on that site for a long period of time. In the optimal scenario, they do not return to the search results to click on another result or reformulate their query.

A long click is a proxy for user satisfaction and success.”

If Google places importance on this metric as an indicator of how their product (the Google search engine) is performing, then surely as web marketers, we should do everything possible to ensure that the maximum amount of clicks on our site result in a long click.

So, we conducted a Google survey that attempted to shed some light on what is the best type of content to feature on law websites do induce long clicks. We needed some numbers on which to base our reasoning, and the results of the survey has turned our heads considerably.

How did we construct the survey? First, we used this screening question:

Why is this significant? If we would not have used this screening question, the majority of answers would have come from people with zero experience hiring a lawyer. That would have helped to make our data a majority of less-useful data.

Next, came the actual question, and the wording was of utmost importance. After, 500 responses, the following data was collected:

When we first got these numbers back, even the overall numbers surprised us. When we broke down those numbers by how different demographic groups answered this question, the results further intrigued us:

For the age group 18-24:

For the age group 25-34:

For the age group 35-44:

For the age group 45-54:

For the age group 55-64:

For the age group 65+:

As you can see, depending solely on the age group, the results differ significantly. This question does not specify which type of lawyer a person is searching for. It does not specify whether you are searching for a personal injury lawyer, a lawyer to help draft a will, or an attorney to help with estate planning. By keeping this question more general, it enabled a more clear look into the role that differing demographics plays on the level of importance of certain information found on attorney websites.

To further prove this point, here are the results comparing answers from people who have differing amounts of income:

Possible Takeaways:

Depending on your target demographic, the type of information that they are seeking (what you should feature on your website) changes immensely.

What content your choose to feature on the pages of your website is a determining factor on how well your firm presents itself online to its target market, and thus, on how often your site obtains a long click. Position it accordingly.

This data also indicates that the importance of the differing types of information on attorney websites is something that changes over time. Even though priorities may change for people as they grow older and more world savvy, in no way does that mean those priorities will remain stagnant within age groups. People are growing up in an increasingly web-familiar world, a different world than ever before. What someone prioritizes as a younger adult, may change by the time they are much older, but it doesn’t mean that those priorities change uniformly across age groups. Essentially, it is increasingly important to continue to keep a close eye on this type of data in order to more highly convert the traffic you are working so hard to acquire into paying clients.

How poor geo-targeting could be costing your law firm clients

Back in February, Mike Ramsey published a piece on SEOmoz detailing the Google Venice updates, and the hybrid local/organic results they produced. These hybrid results, which I’ll refer to here as local(ish) are being triggered more and more often when a user seaches a broad keyword query which GOogle identifies as being locally relevant. For example, try searching “Personal Injury Lawyer” with your Google browser localtion set to “United States”. You’ll probably see something like this:

 

Now, change the browser to a specific city. Here is what you will see searching the same broad term “Personal Injury Lawyer” with the browser location set to Seattle:

These organic results, displayed beneath the traditional local results, are locally relevant even though the search term is broad, or not geo-specific.

How to optimize for these local(ish) results

There is a lot of research and testing still to be done on the ranking factors that go into these local(ish) results (which we at Ethical SEO Consulting are working on as we speak!). However, there are a couple of things that we do know are necessary to be able to rank highly for these kinds of searches:

1. Location + keyword in page title, URL, H1, meta description, etc.
2. High domain authority (quality and quantity of inbound links)

Why does this matter to your firm?

Simple. Without the proper optimization you could very well be ranking highly for these broad search phrases on a national level, but when users in your target markets are searching these broad queries, you may be getting beat out by local competitors whose sites are better optimized for these local queries.

Matthew Green+

As an attorney, you provide a service that is in constant demand. However, the key to sustained growth is ensuring that the people who are actively searching for the services you provide are finding you, and when they do, what they see is influencing them take action in the form of an email, a live chat with a representative, or a good old fashioned phone call. In order to achieve this “find-ability” for your law firm you have to choose the right marketing plan. We have seen time and time again that SEO is a great way to market your law practice. There are some very specific reasons for this compatibility. Here they are:
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The average business’s website get’s 50% of it’s traffic from search engine users. That means that, if your site does not have a strong search engine presence it is essentially only reaching people who have already have determined that they want to visit your site. In this case, you might as well not have a website.

The beauty of SEO, specifically for lawyers and law firms, is that you have a captive, and impatient audience already built in on search engines. You also have a lot of people searching for a very specific service, which you offer. Hold the top search engine spots for the search queries that these people are searching for and you will find that signing cases, and lots of them, is far easier than you ever imagined.

There is no doubt that have a great law firm website, which looks clean and has an intuitive navigation and useful content is a good thing, but if the only people who are ever using it are people who were already looking for it, then you site simply isn’t fulfilling its maximum potential. With a targeted SEO campaign for your law firm, you can transform your site from a nice resource for your already existing clients and colleagues, into a lead generation tool which can help sustain growth for your firm indefinitely over time.

Don’t settle for a business website that doesn’t work as lead generation tool for your firm. Get on track with a effective and sustainable SEO strategy which will produce results for years and years to come.

Written By, Matthew Green+

It wasn’t long ago that Yellow Page Ad’s, Television Commercials, and Radio advertising got Attorney’s a consistent number of new cases for  a decent rate.  Recently however that landscape has evolved into one where Online Marketing and SEO can be your best investment for acquiring new clients. With over a billion daily searches on Google it’s no surprise that Attorney’s who rank well for useful keywords are being very successful.

With thousands of Lawyer related searches such as “local car accident attorney” or “I need a bankruptcy lawyer” it’s easy to determine the searcher’s intent when they type these keywords into Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines.  Ranking highly for terms such as these that get a decent a number of daily traffic is the first step in generating new clients for your firm. In fact, if you’r website is user friendly, useful to the searcher, and has clear calls to action; you might just sign a new case. And that is where Ethical SEO Consulting comes in…

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