Picture this: your firm has just spent months going back and forth with a team of web designers trying to create a website. After many hours of labor, you finally have a product that has some marketing power, but there’s a problem – the site isn’t getting any visitors.
For most law firms, the most difficult part of making a website work is implementing an effective strategy for generating visitors who will potentially become clients. Until recently, much of the talk in this area has focused on search engine optimization, or SEO for short. SEO encompasses the breadth of processes undertaken for the purpose of raising a website’s rankings in search engines. Given that 85% of individuals utilize search engines online, it is easy to see the importance of a high page ranking. Highly-ranked websites will undoubtedly receive more visitors, and it follows that more visitors will translate into more clients.
With such a seemingly rosy upside to distract them, few people take into account the full cost of search engine optimization. The SEO industry has enjoyed a period of significant growth in the past few years, but there is still only one Google, one Yahoo!, and one Bing, and competition for desirable keywords has never been more intense. Today, the same SEO metrics that would have had a website ranked #1 in the past may not even place the same website on the first page. This influx in competition has made search engine optimization an expensive endeavor.
Thankfully, search engine rankings don’t hold a monopoly on internet traffic generation. Firms now have a wide variety of tools at their disposal to gain exposure for their website, many of which provide greater flexibility in reaching a target audience while minimizing cost. Social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook, have been hailed as the models of the Web 2.0 world. Web 2.0 sites are characterized by interaction among users and the real-time sharing of information, which, when used correctly, can be a very effective strategy in generating web traffic. When the user consents to the virtual relationship (accepting a Facebook friend or “following” an account on Twitter), the user “opts-in” to receiving messages sent by the firm. A developed social network presence gives a firm access to a targeted audience of individuals almost in real-time. Furthermore, these sites allow users the ability to easily forward content to their network, which can then in turn be forwarded again and again.
Another emerging trend is the cost-per-action model of advertising. Broken down into cost-per-impression and cost-per-click, the cost-per-action model gives firms previously unparalleled control over who sees their ad and how much they pay to place themselves in front of an audience. Based on the particular cost-per-action model that is chosen, the firm sets the maximum cost that they’re willing to pay for each potential visitor. All major search engines offer cost-per-click advertising. Google has its Adsense network; Yahoo! offers the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Facebook even provides its own cost-per-click advertisements. On Adsense and Facebook, the paid advertisements appear to the right of the page content. Networks allow advertisers to control parameters which will limit to whom they show the advertisement. For instance, Facebook allows advertisers to include individuals who have particular phrases in their profile (including geographic locations). In this way, a firm is afforded maximum flexibility in deploying their advertising budget.
Technology on the web is developing faster than ever. Different features are being created every day to improve our ability to reach our target audience. In the future, some technology will become obsolete and fall by the wayside, while new technology will emerge in its place, providing continuously more effective – and more cost-effective – methods of generating web traffic and bringing in new clients.