If you've been following the SEO space for, even a handful of years, you know that there's this recurring suggestion that "SEO is dead." In fact, if you go search for "seo is dead" in Google, the results are comical. Despite all of the attempts to kill-off SEO, it still remains one of the most efficient ways to earn meaningful attention.
Recently, at least in some of the law firm SEO corners I lurk in, there has been an uptick in the death of SEO proclamations. Maybe it's the recent algorithm updates. Maybe it's changes made to Google Ads. Maybe it's just that time of year.
The image at the top of this post is a Google Search Console performance report for a website published by a law firm. It's comparing organic clicks from the last three months with the prior year (approximately October to December 2019 versus same period in 2018). As you can see, year over year, clicks have essentially doubled.
We can debate SEO strategies and tactics all day, every day. And we should. It's a dynamic environment and is changing all of the time. But if someone is telling you that "SEO is dead," and they intend to imply something like, "all the clicks go to ads," they're either misinformed, or unfortunately more likely, intentionally misleading you.
Some people say, "SEO is dead," to imply that it's really hard to rank for competitive queries. If that's the implication, then I agree. However, it's still seems misleading to say that it's dead. Instead, why not say, "it's really hard to rank for competitive queries?"
For those wondering what the secret is for generating 100K+ organic clicks over a three month time period, I say to you: Meh, links.
But seriously though, it really comes down to three things:
For those wondering, this site doesn't have a Google My Business listing. None of these clicks come from the local pack.
That's not to suggest that local SEO isn't important. It is.
The problem is that local SEO, particularly ranking in the local pack for category terms, isn't the only game in town.
In fact, on a sheer volume of queries basis, research queries command a much larger share of the total search pie. This really shouldn't be that hard to comprehend. Think about how you use search. Do you only use it for business look-ups? Of course not. The same is true for legal services consumers.
Hopefully, if any of this resonates with you, you will at least consider the chance that SEO is not dead for law firms, or most other businesses for that matter.
Instead of abandoning all hope and dumping all of your marketing / advertising time and money into paid ads, consider changing your approach to SEO. You probably don't even need to generate results like the example in this post. Depending on your practice, even hundreds of qualified clicks can add real value to your firm.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
