One writer had a peculiar response to our recent press release about how our little law firm with a small advertising budget is drawing more people to our web site than the web sites of the 10 biggest law firms in the country. Maybe the significance of the accomplishment was not obvious enough.
It was peculiar because it came from Carolyn Elefant, not only a solo-practioner, but an author whose books and blogs champion the cause of the solo-practioner. So it was odd to see her question the value of relevance of our law firm touting that we can attract more visitors to our web site than those of the big law firms.
Elefant stated that beating big firms in generating web traffic “doesn’t mean much in my book.” I am not sure which of her books she is referring to, but I think all of them would benefit from providing proof that quality content and innovative SEO strategies can attract more traffic than big budgets and even bigger reputations.
Maybe she missed the point of our release? It would not be the only one she missed in her response.
Elefant then reported the results of her haphazard test of our web site’s performance in the search-engines. She searched on terms like “expunging record” and “criminal record expunge.” While our site out performs all other law firms in our niche, our real success comes from thinking like a client, not like an attorney. Meaning, our site’s optimization and content is designed to reach people who do not know what expunge means or that such a remedy exists. For instance, if a person searches “travel to Canada with a criminal record,” the third result on Google is an article on our web site that talks about expungement and how it can help when traveling to Canada. Another one of dozens examples is “restore firearm rights after domestic violence” where our site is number 1 on Google.
These non-traditional approaches attract a lot of visitors. More importantly, they are attracting visitors who have a need for the service and did not know it. In the business world they call that growing the market.
This strategy is good for us because it often makes us the client first and complete of information. It is good for society because it provides quality information to people who need it— translation, small law firm providing big benefits to society.
Ms. Elefant concludes, “Fixating on and understanding SEO rankings and page traffic may be interesting, but in the end, it’s results that count – the quality of the traffic generated, not sheer quantity.” I am not sure what Ms. Elefant means by quality, but, according to Alexa.com, the average visitor stays on our site for 10.9 minutes. For reference, that is more than twice as long as visitors to CNN.com (5.5 minutes), more than triple that of all of the top-ten biggest law firms, and more than quadruple that of Myshingle.com (2.8 minutes).
Maybe we should have simplified our press release by just simply stating: to lawyers who want to make a major impact on the internet with a small budget, you can do it. And to those who think you need to have a giant IT department, hundreds of attorneys and a seven-figure advertising budget to create a law firm web site that makes a big difference on the internet, we say one obvious thing— scoreboard.
http://www.myshingle.com/admin/trackback/126974
No Comments Yet
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
