Company News

SHARON NELSON AND JOHN SIMEK ARE QUOTED IN SLAW

May 29, 2014

In the May 22nd edition of Slaw, Canada’s online legal magazine, Ms. Nelson and Mr. Simek highlight details learned at a recent conference led by Mark Jacobsen of Findlaw, regarding search engine optimization for lawyers.

Branded searches account for 38% of all law firm searches.  That means that someone already knows about the firm, someone in it or another aspect of its brand.  If someone is looking for your firm they should be able to find you with a branded search.

The other 62% of the searches are not branded.  This is where things get interesting.  Most attorneys think that if they can be found for the “head-term phrases” (such as Northern Virginia Personal Injury Attorney) that is the key to the firm’s success, but this will waste a lot of money to be found for those phrases on search engine results (SERPs).

People are actually searching and doing research for what are called “long tail searches with lawyer intent”.  These are very specific and provide more details for the search.  Due to the sheer volume of searches the click through rate is low, but these result in 66.9% of non-branded visits to your site.  The long-tail searchers will end up visiting the site 31.8% of the time and the head-term searchers will visit about 1.3% of the time.

The contact rates (what you are trying to get on the site) are greatly improved by using the long-tailed queries, so work on the specific areas that individuals will be searching for and not paying to be found for the generic phrases.

To read the entire article click on Slaw.