Is Search Engine Optimisation Really Dead?

There was an interesting article today, 31 August 2012, in NZLawyer Online. Tony Reardon wrote under the headline, Forget about SEO and think business strategy

I agree with plenty of what Tony says, except to stress that as far as lawyers are concerned truly smart firms have only ever had Website SEO (and PPC advertising) as part of an overall, far wider, Business Development strategy.

When he says Google will always "win" because they control the rules and can and do change them when they want, he implies that Google is your competitor…they're not, but they're of course very important to how people access the vast information on the web...

We know huge volumes of people search…both anecdotally and from the evidence in the numbers...and we know a good percentage of them click through to law firm sites either via organic search results or via the paid ads.(Approx. 60/40 split).

That's delivering people to your website, where you must provide the quality content and good experience.

That will deliver acceptable levels of new enquiry for the cost, and provided you look after them they are your clients then like our existing others sourced from whatever strategies.

Sensible SEO still makes a lot of sense (especially because much of the good SEO is content based)…if we're not being ridiculous in manipulating Google, when they make a big change to shake off the underhanded nonsense engaged in by others we're not much affected…in fact our rankings may well at least temporarily improve...

SEO helps get you better exposure to searches that you would otherwise…well done it's got you on page one and well ranked on page one…and Content is a big part of the SEO mix…

When you're ranked well in organic search for your chosen words, terms and phrases, and you also have well-drafted PPC ads appearing in the right spots above the search results, anecdotal evidence is that your click through rate improves quite markedly…I guess your "authority" appears to get cross-pollinated in effect in the eyes of the person searching.

You're not "losing" to Google by being involved ongoing in quality SEO…you're deriving a strong advantage over your competition in this one area of Business Development strategy.

As Tony rightly says, there are other areas of strategy that are more traditional and remain effective…all part of a smart total mix…especially as very often the types of clients delivered straight from "Search" will be quite different from the types of new clients delivered by smart other strategies as they always have been.

Above all, experimentation and monitoring remain vital…test new opportunities and monitor cost vs return…across all of your strategy...

However the biggest impediment to strong business growth I've found in practices throughout Australasia in consulting to them over the last twenty-five years is lawyers who do exponentially more talking and planning in marketing than they do in executing, "walking the talk".

Once all the planning and discussing is done a true professional is comfortable being held to account for consistent effective delivery.

If there really is too much good work, arrange short-term and then permanent extra assistance.

However, the world is full of lawyers who claim to be "very busy", can't fit in consistent effective marketing, yet don't produce particularly good outcomes. Being ineffective comes in many different shapes, sizes and colours!

Pay per click advertising...Google AdWords etc

Pay Per Click Advertising...

For those of you I know who are already involved in this area there may be some value in the intelligence I picked up last night over dinner with my daughter in Sydney.

She is the Online Marketing Manager for an Insurance Company who have an annual SEM spend in many millions…

The main search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) all use a Quality Score to help determine your position in paid search and the cost of being in that position. If you can concentrate on legitimately improving your Quality Score, you can have more control over what you spend. For more information on what factors affect Quality Score, click here.

The question is often asked, "How do the search engines determine the position of your ads in paid search?"

A very rough rule of thumb is your quality score times your bid amount.

Quality score is a ranking system that Google uses to determine how relevant and useful a search engine thinks your business is to someone searching for your products and services online. The rank impacts both the cost and position of your PPC ads on the search engine results page. 

Typically, a business’s text ads, keywords and landing pages are evaluated and you are given a score from 1 to 10 (10 being the best), and the higher your score, the more relevant your business appears to be to a related search.

Effectively, if A wanted to bid $100 to be in paid ad position #1 and had a QS of 5, but then B came in and bid $80 and had a QS of 7, B would win (7 x $80 is more than 5 x $100). This would also mean that B can afford to pull back the spend (or reallocate it) because he can now afford to be in position 1 and only pay $72 per click.

Importantly, the Quality score is given to each keyword or phrase in the account. So for example, "Estate Disputes" may have a Quality score of 9 because it gets a good click through rate, the landing page is relevant to the ad, and the keywords are used in both, whereas "contesting a will" only gets a quality score of 5, for the same reasons (eg not a good click through rate, lack of keywords in the landing page, etc). So there are hundreds of Quality scores in each account given to the keywords, not the account as a whole.

To help optimise spend she uses software to automatically manage bid levels and budget over time…even within a day the bid levels and budgets change…see also below. A bid management tool is not particularly useful for small accounts (modest budget and limited key words/phrases).

As a very rough rule of thumb,Organic links receive approx. 60% of all clicks in a search engine results page, with SEM receiving 40%.

The ads that appear above your organic search results are the ones that get most of that 40% available action, and position #1 gets most of the clicks...

If your ad is appearing at the side of the organic search results, and well down the list, the percentage of available clicks you get is very low indeed... 

To get the most out of your search strategy, both SEM and SEO should form part of the mix. Whilst not known what the % of lift in clicks is, appearing in the top 3 positions for both SEM and SEO will help ensure one of your ads is clicked on and a visit/lead delivered to your site.

Our discussion was just a chat…not intended to cover all the bases, but I thought you might be interested in her observations given the level of spend and intense experience…

In my own experience the visitor to your site who has arrived via either organic search results or PPC ads is looking for information that meets their needs fast…so the quality of content on your landing pages is vitally important and must be relevant to them. Making strong, obvious calls to action on those pages is essential. To really continue to optimise, testing different creative, and calls to action, is essential.

Analysing how long the average visitor spends on your site and how many pages they look at is very useful…especially once you understand what they did when they "finished"…did they leave, or did they make an enquiry on-line, or call the dedicated phone number provided?

Am sure many of you will have known some of these key issues from your own research and experience…I trust this adds a little too...

PS Just for interest, my daughter says that the term ‘life insurance’ is the most hotly contested and expensive search term in the country. The CPC for life insurance, when sitting at the top of the list as above (where they must be) tends to range from $70 to $110 depending on day of week and time of day…at proven peak times for searches in her field competition is intense, and I'm sure the bid management software more than earns its keep!

Your law firm cash flow...do you monitor well or manage well?

In my experience most small-medium law firms do not fully understand the fundamentals of cash flow, and as a result tend to be way too passive or reactive in dealing with the challenges, rather than consistently and smartly active...

The immediate, or imminent, cash flow situation, good or bad, is the outcome of a series of things you did or did not do beforehand, often some time previously...

Here are just some factors that need to be consistently dealt with:

Arranging consistent, effective, business development activity...

Controlling the number of speculative matters in which you are engaged...

Controlling the outlay of your funds on client disbursements without quickly collecting them back...

Getting client engagement management consistently right...

Not borrowing too much so interest outlays are too high...

Not borrowing too little so operations are unreasonably restricted...

Not paying off debt too quickly given your requirements for adequate working capital...

Paying down reasonable debt when you can if you have too much borrowed...

Watching the level of principals' drawings or dividend payments...

Not pricing in a pessimistic manner so margins are inherently slim...

Not remunerating fee-earners  by formulas tied to fees, especially silly ratios like 1:3 that are outdated by many decades (and were never accurate or wise anyway)...

Getting proper amounts from clients as retainers wherever commercially sound...and keeping those retainers topped up as matters progress...

Having systems that ensure clients are billed at the earliest possible time in every matter commensurate with engagement terms...

Ensuring that engagement management allows for interim billing in all appropriate matters...

Keeping level of matters per fee-earner high enough that there is always a healthy backlog of work and sound profits can be generated in the area most small firms fail to produce anything...the profit zone...

Keeping level of matters at the correct level so even hard-working fee-earners can't fall into the trap of allowing file velocity to drop below optimum possible...tying up precious working capital too long

Being indignant about debtors paying on time in full...running systems to make it clear what is required and ensuring early and commercially vigorous follow up immediately debtors are overdue...

Purchasing a series of "small" assets with cash when that was not wise in light of the firm's working capital situation...

Summary...
All too often I see firms with cash flow problems where the focus has been on the easy approaches that happen to be almost always ineffective...they analyse, monitor, assess, review or predict cash flow, often when the problems have been brewing for a long period...

What they need to be doing is the harder yards, in the areas above and others, influencing cash flow positively, controlling it, managing it and driving it...

Biggest profit traps for young and not so young lawyers

In my involvement in management of 1211 small-medium law firms in the last quarter of a century I have come across a wide range of reasons why law firms regularly produce pretty ordinary levels of profit...

From time to time in my posts I'll address the leading reasons law firms often fall short on real profit after principals' salaries...

Today's profit trap for law firms...

Assuming improvements in profit can usually only be incremental...

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Most law firm principals and managers assume they have done the majority of things "fairly well" already, and just need to find a few novel ways to tweak a few things to edge profit up a bit...

Q: Why the profit-killing assumption?

A: It's human nature not to start from an assumption that we've mucked up most of the important things to date!

In my experience most law firms will have some  key elements of the main game badly wrong...and as soon as they are fixed, and they're obvious to someone experienced and usually common sense rather than novel...profit can leap forward in ways never imagined to be possible...