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Using Google AdWords to market your law firm? If you’re paying for ads and ignoring your organic search engine placement then 84% of web surfers will never click on your ad. Even worse, only 8% of all internet users will account for 85% of all clicks.
Shocking, huh? Well, these are the stats according to the most recent “Natural Born Clickers” study from ComScore and media agency Starcom.
The number of people online who click display ads has dropped 50% in less than two years, according to the report. Quite a fall from grace, I’d say.
Clickers only represent 16% of U.S. internet users, according to ComScore data from March. The study initially found that 32% clicked on display advertising in July 2007. The 2008 study found half of all clicks come from lower-income young adults, so prizing clicks ignores the vast majority of internet users, especially the types of users lawyers who use paid ads to market their firms want to reach.
Of course, if you’re a major brand then the study offers a ray of light – display ads, regardless of clicks, generate significant lift in brand-site visitation, and things like that.
But you’re not a brand, and nobody really cares about you. One lawyer in a sea of millions, it’s hard to imagine a law firm being elevated to the level of, say, Toyota.
So what’s a lawyer to do when trying to increase their exposure to people who might need them? If paid ads don’t work, what will become of the poor lawyer who only wants to get people to visit his or her site?
You need to optimize your website’s content so that you show up higher on the organic rankings. Create useful content that is attractive to the people you want to work with; bringing them to the site is important, but Google also looks as user behavior once on the site as a signal of how to rank you. How long the user stays, what they do, whether they view a lot of your content or merely one page … things that indicate whether your content is actually useful or just a rehash of the same old stuff found in a bazillion other places online.
You need to create a tractor beam, a way to get someone’s email address (and, ideally, their name) so you can continue to educate them over time on the benefits of working with you and how you can solve their problems.
Your site needs to look like it was designed sometime after 1999, and it needs to render properly in all browsers.
You need to actually pay attention to your website and making it as useful as your potential client needs it to be – not only as useful as you want it to be.
In other words, you don’t want to be lazy with this. Your online presence is more important now than ever before – don’t squander it.
Here’s the AdAge article about that ComScore study.
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