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.

 

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+