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Many full-service digital marketing agencies offer every service you can think of to help bankruptcy law firms win potential clients with an online presence.
While it’s nice to have a one-stop service where you can fold everything you need into one invoice, it’s not always the best marketing strategy for a bankruptcy lawyer.
Here are five reasons why:
If you are in the process of hiring a marketing agency to manage your online presence, you should be asking them how many labor hours are going into SEO efforts. An honest marketing firm should be able to answer those questions without hesitation.
The number of hours in your SEO campaign will vary depending on the complexity of your website’s setup, competitors in the bankruptcy industry, and how much visibility you want to win.
Marketing agencies would average 10-20 hours per month for an average website with a budget. But if you have a campaign focused on SEO and content, you can greatly reduce that time and your monthly cost.
We’ve experienced a lot of cross-over relationships from other agencies in the digital marketing agency world. The effort that goes into elaborate reporting, monthly calls, and strategy “noise” can take a huge chunk of the actual implementation.
While strategy, calls, and reporting are important for your success, you’ll want to make sure that most of your budget is feeding into hands-on technical SEO, on-page SEO, content writing and publishing, and link acquisition.
As such, you should look for trusted SEO specialists that you can build a relationship that you can appreciate. If you want the calls and reporting to be top-notch, that’s great; however, it’s a good idea to make sure there’s actual SEO implementation happening with your campaign.
Trusted SEOs will do well by squeezing every last drop of your law firm’s marketing budget into getting search clicks and conversions.
We once had a client come to us with his frustrations that his SEO agency was outsourcing.
Not that he had issues with the idea of outsourcing, but the language became an issue when the meta descriptions of his web pages were being optimized.
There was a big gap between how his clients would want to see written on the page and what was written. Imagine having your bankruptcy law firm website have grammar errors on it. And then having those errors show up in Google search. Ouch!
In another example, we had a lady targeting multiple locations for her service business.
The SEO firm she hired to help her win leads from search was outsourcing, and they often made mistakes with geographical locations, zip codes, and the name, address phone number situation.
Because of the importance of local SEO and local listings, your name, address, and phone number should never have room for location errors.
Small errors lead to big drops in SERPS. So taking a risk with a big SEO agency that is most likely outsourcing their labor could cost you a lot of time, frustration, and money.
Even though outsourcing can help with profits, it’s not in your best interest as a bankruptcy law firm to have your SEO agency outsourcing.
You want a US SEO team that understands the culture and language of a bankruptcy law firm, city locations,
SEO agencies are specific to Google search visibility. That’s where most of your budget should go. Unfortunately, using a catch-all service will get you a lot of impressions on Facebook but not a lot of clicks and calls, which is really what you want.
While we do recommend running ads in addition to SEO, it should never be where most of the volume of your marketing budget is allotted.
Ads are a push-in type of visibility where people are served up an ad in a format when they don’t want to see it.
So impressions are high, but clicks are very low, and even when the clicks are okay, the time they spend on your website is usually much lower than search engine traffic.
Search engine traffic is a pull-them-in type of visibility. Your impressions can be lower than running ads, but the clicks you get are much higher in quality.
This is because they are on Google and need your bankruptcy law firm’s services NOW.
When it comes to fancy marketing firms, the hard truth is that you’re just another number. We’ve experienced huge marketing agencies charging lawyers a minimum of $2,000, and they are managing hundreds and sometimes thousands of clients.
While this may feel awesome in the beginning because of a great sales pitch, or a beautiful slide deck to show you all of the shiny diamonds you’ll be getting with your budget, it’s not going to deliver what a micro SEO company can deliver for you.
A micro SEO company will take care of you, answer the phone and talk when you need to, and show you detailed reporting when you ask for it.
To learn more about why SEO for bankruptcy law firms is the most valuable online visibility strategy for you, reach out to Jeff here.