The Best Tactic to Boost Your Traffic: SEO or PPC?
By Next Level Pod on July 31st, 2021 in Uncategorized
As a law firm owner, you’re wearing so many different hats. You’re trying to focus on a million things at once.
On top of that, there are so many voices shouting at law firm owners from every direction and they’re all saying different things. Some say we should focus on SEO while others say PPC is the way to go.
How are you supposed to know what to spend your time and money on?
This was something Melanie faced time and time again when she owned her law firm. One of her biggest challenges was knowing what to focus on.
Mark has extensive experience with this issue as a result of his years working with law firms on their marketing strategy. Here are some of his best information and tips on SEO and PPC to help you make an informed decision on which one to prioritize and invest in first.
SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization and a lot of things get lumped into it. There’s underlying technical code you can put into a website to optimize how easily it’s found on a search engine. There’s also outreach work that helps get other websites that have trusted sources to link back to your website. On top of that, there’s content strategy where you consider the actual content that the search engines are reading about your website that helps it understand where it should fit in the search engines and helps it rank. Finally, there are local search functions that get your firm’s website to show up on the map functions of a search engine.
All of these are important for a variety of reasons. Firstly, search engines are important. The Clio Legal Trends Report in 2019 showed where people go to find legal help is 50/50. This means that half of people are going to Google to find a law firm. Additionally, the average website gets about 51% of its traffic from organic search and about 50% of searches don’t have any paid ads on them at any given time.
However, half the clicks on Google searches go to the top 3 organic results. For SEO to work, you have to appear in organic search pages and especially in those top 3 links.
PPC
PPC stands for pay per click but it really just means paid advertising. PPC just uses one tactic: it displays ads on Google, mobile sites, and social media. It has come a long way and there are a lot of reasons it’s important.
First of all, as great as SEO is, to do it right takes 9-12 months depending on how competitive your area is. Paid advertising, on the other hand, is relatively fast. You just need to make sure to prioritize quality over quantity. It typically takes a few months to figure out which traffic is converting best for your firm based on your target market, clients, location, etc.
Additionally, PPC is beneficial because Google makes almost all of its money on paid ads. This reveals how prevalent ads have become. When someone searches a high intent to purchase keyword phrase (meaning something that reveals they have a high intent to purchase something, such as a search for “microwave reviews”), ⅔ of their clicks will go to ads.
This means that as an advertiser, you want to put your best ads on things that are super high intent. All of this can lead to you getting a positive ROI on paid ads.
Which You Should Invest In
Ads are taking up more and more of the search results but SEO is still very beneficial. As a result, you need a custom marketing strategy.
However, the answer Mark gives most when talking with law firms is to invest in both PPC and SEO. He suggests law firm owners incorporate both into their marketing strategy over a year or so.
The reason for this is that both are good on their own. When put together, however, their effect is multiplied. By running ads you get content you can use for SEO that helps it significantly. Consider, therefore, doing some SEO work but spending a little money on high intent keywords and throwing in an ad. This could double your traffic while you wait for your SEO to grow.
If you want to learn more about PPC and SEO, check out https://nextlevel.legal/episode/lfn006/