At cj Advertising, we’ve always maintained that, when it comes to websites for law firms, conversions are more important than search rankings. But to ensure we’re giving our clients the best chance of success, we recently put our beliefs to a new test.
In the last six months of 2016, we paid a well-known SEO company over $20,000 to work independently on five of our client sites. The goal was to experiment with keywords and search practices to determine how SEO influences site performance. After a lot of behind-the-scenes collaboration—including content changes, meta-tag adjustments, backlink additions, and more—the final result was unfortunately less than impressive.
The test confirmed our suspicion: an SEO strategy that focuses on rankings does not necessarily create more leads or conversions and is not the best investment of marketing dollars for well-branded firms.
Going Forward
While the SEO company’s keyword tracking tool showed rank increases for most of the sites, there were no noticeable increases in traffic or conversions to correlate with the increased position of the keywords. Nevertheless, we are incorporating some of new theories into our site builds and redesigns. Going forward, our processes will include adding more content to the heavily-trafficked areas of our sites, as well as reevaluating the titles and meta descriptions during site maintenance. Both practices will allow us to encourage conversions with natural sounding content.
The firms we tested were Sam Aguiar Injury Lawyers, William Mattar Law Offices, ChasenBoscolo, Jason Stone Injury Lawyers, and Ponce Law. There were lots of statistical fluctuations, but ultimately, the results that matter were inconclusive at best. We are happy to share specifics with any interested law firms, and we plan to continue testing on other fronts. Our effort to keep our clients’ sites on-brand while converting relevant traffic into cases remains our number one priority.
