Page 30 - PIC e-newsletter Spring Issue 8

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WHY ARE SO MANY LAW
FIRMS GETTING ONLINE
MARKETING WRONG?
FIRST4LAWYERS RECENTLY LAUNCHED A WHITEPAPER ON MARKETING IN LAW FIRMS. AS PART OF THE RESEARCH IT RAN A WEBSITE AUDIT ON 100 LAW FIRMS’ WEBSITES INCLUDING THE TOP 10 LEGAL WEBSITES IN THE UK. ANDY CULLWICK SHARES SOME OF THE KEY FINDINGS AND WHAT THEY MEAN FOR LAW FIRMS.
irst4Lawyers reviewed how well the websites ranked in Google, the security of the websites and also how well optimised they were for an increasingly mobile future.
These factors are by no means everything
you should be looking at when reviewing the performance of your website but they are a good starting point and will tell you a lot.
Unfortunately the ndings showed that many were lagging behind and getting their online marketing wrong.
There are a number of tools and metrics that you can use to see how well a website is performing, but a website visibility score is one of the best ways to indicate how visible your domain is for key searched terms.
A visibility score is calculated by looking at the rankings of all the keywords on your website, looking at where you appear in search engines for these keywords and the search volume available to those key terms.
The websites with the highest visibility scores in the UK are the likes of Facebook, Wikipedia and the BBC and they have scores into the millions.
Across the legal sector a good score would be around 1,000 and a great score would be 6,000 to 7,000. The highest visibility score in the legal sector at the time of this research was just short of 9,000.
The top 10 PI related brands had an average visibility score of 4,318 compared to 214 for the other 70 rms we audited.
The audit also identi ed that 32% of the websites we reviewed had a visibility score of zero. In essence this means almost a third of the businesses have websites that don’t rank organically and therefore the only traf c they are likely to get to their website is either through paid activity (and they will be paying a fortune for it) or because visitors know about the website and are going direct to it.
Next we looked at how visibility had changed over the year since Google had introduced new criteria on how it ranked websites in search results. Between the initial update by Google and our audit the average visibility score for the websites we audited was 186 which at face value means visibility has improved 15%.
Which is good. Isn’t it?
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