* Post Updated: 10/28/2010
Online marketing and SEO have become increasingly important for law firms trying to compete in extremely competitive niche and local search environments.
I wanted to showcase a Newsblogging campaign for the Law Offices of Daniel R. Rosen, a personal injury attorney olympia wa that has been with SixEstate for about 6 months. The campaign has really opened my eyes to the value of good content on SEO for “local” businesses.
Background
The personal injury law market is highly competitive. A major U.S. city could have dozens, if not hundreds of personal injury firms all competing for a limited number of clients. Some firms handle all kinds of injury cases, while others may specialize in a specific area like auto accidents or medical malpractice. Regardless, they’re all competing for much of the same business within the confines of their city or state.
The Law Offices of Daniel R. Rosen, PC, is a personal injury firm with 10 offices throughout Colorado, including Denver, which is the biggest market in the state. The firm specializes in all kinds of accident cases, but car and motorcycle accidents are its bread and butter.
Online & Search Marketing
Google is the new marketing turf for personal injury law firms. Old school marketing efforts like phone book ads and TV commercials simply don’t cut it anymore. Just a few years ago, it’s quite likely someone injured in a motorcycle accident would have opened up a phone book to find a local law firm. Now, of course, the victim goes to a computer, or picks up a mobile phone, and Googles accident lawyer Denver, Colorado motorcycle accident, or a similar term.
Personal injury firms that want to acquire new clients need to be visible through online search, because that’s the first place most consumers — including accident victims — turn for information and solutions to their problems.
Without getting deep into the PPC vs. organic search results debate, 75% of all search engine clicks are organic. So, quite simply, a first-page organic search position for target keyphrases means business for personal injury firms.
Competition among hundreds of Denver’s personal injury firms to get on the first page is extremely intense. Here are a few relevant search terms, along with the number of Google results associated with each:
- Colorado motorcycle accident — 353,000
- Colorado accident lawyer — 2,180,000
- accident injury lawyer Denver — 1,250,000
- accident injury lawyer Colorado — 2,600,000
A first page (or top-10) position out of hundreds of thousands of search results is no easy task, especially when hundreds of other law firms are competing for the same top spots.
A New Approach to Legal Marketing
As SixEstate focuses on high-quality journalism to boost online awareness for our clients, we wanted to help the Law Offices of Daniel R. Rosen achieve first-page results by providing good, meaningful content. We knew linking and other SEO techniques had to play at least a small role in such a competitive search environment, but Newsblogging had to be the difference maker.
After all, the firm’s competitors were all using either SEO or legal marketing companies, but none were focusing on content. Some of them had blogs — but they were rarely updated, or had “spammy, robot content,” as I like to call it. Not one competitor we researched had a decent, regularly updated blog.
So, after designing a new website in WordPress, we’ve created the Colorado Accident Law Blog to focus on accident news in Denver and throughout Colorado. Since our writers are journalists — not lawyers — we knew we had to stay away from legal advice. We put George “Loki” Williams, social media consultant and veteran blogger, on the assignment. Loki comes from a family of lawyers and has a wealth of experience with local journalism.
From Invisible to the First Page
Before we started the campaign, the Law Offices of Daniel R. Rosen had an invisible Web presence. The website itself was poorly designed and horribly optimized. You couldn’t find it on the first 10 pages of Google for any target search term. And that’s as far as we’ve checked — who knows how deep the site actually was buried?
After two weeks of Newsblogging, we started hitting Google Alerts and the first page of Google Blog Search for various key search terms every single day. There was no impact on the client’s business at this point (accident victims don’t exactly follow Google Alerts in case they get into an accident), but this indicated to us that Google had begun to notice the blog, and that real, significant results were right around the corner.
After six weeks, we hit the first page of Google Web Search for the term motorcycle accident Colorado (see below) and several variations of that. It was a blog post that made the front page, not the homepage.
We’ve now been Newsblogging for 6 months and have successfully reached the first page of Google for an array of high-volume, target search terms. As of this post, we are on the first page of Google for (list updated: 10/28/10):
- Colorado accident lawyer
- accident injury lawyer Denver
- accident injury lawyer Colorado
- Colorado motorcycle accident
- Colorado accident law
- among others…
Conclusion
First-page results in and of themselves don’t matter — it’s how much business you generate. In the 10 weeks since we started Newsblogging for the Law Offices of Daniel R. Rosen, Google has accounted for over 60% of site visits, traffic is growing consistently, and dozens of contact form submissions, phone calls and emails have come in from site visitors.
Now it’s up to the Law Offices of Daniel R. Rosen to turn those prospects into business.
Source: “The Disconnect in PPC vs. SEO Spending,” SEOmoz, 10/21/08
Image by mrbill, used under its Creative Commons license
Google Search Screen Shot by SixEstate.