Nolo's Lawyer Blog

Clicks, hits, visits, uniques, impressions, page views, conversion rates, click-throughs, CPM (cost per thousand impressions), RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) CPC or PPC (cost per click), CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per acquisition), ROI (return on investment) -- what does it all mean?

Are you drowning in a stormy sea of unfamiliar terms and conflicting information, trying to quantify and measure the success of your online marketing? Are legal marketing companies making promises based on SEO metrics and page one placement with major search engines like Google and Bing?

Value vs. Volume

The bottom line for attorneys, especially solo practitioners and smaller firms: it's a competitive landscape out there, and at the end of the day, you're just trying to attract more clients who want to hire you. You can have all the "traffic" in the world, lots of clicks and unique visitors, but how do we qualify this traffic, and how many of those qualified visitors end up becoming clients?

Let's take a closer look at overall online marketing and advertising strategies and try to get to the bottom of the great traffic debate.

Online advertising continues to drive the majority of revenues with the big four search engines; Google, Yahoo!, Bing and AOL, leading the pack. According to Price Waterhouse Coopers, "search revenue accounted for 47 percent of 2009 second quarter revenues, up from the 44 percent reported in the second quarter of 2008. Display advertising, the second largest format, accounted for 35 percent, followed by Classifieds (10 percent), and Lead Generation (7 percent) of 2009 second quarter revenues", totaling $5.5 billion.

Different advertisers and marketers are paying for different types of online exposure. But exposure alone doesn't necessarily mean more customers. Paying for clicks, hits or visits on one site might not provide the same ROI as another site, depending on visitor demographics and how qualified the traffic is.

Here at Nolo, for example, we pride ourselves on being a full-service legal resource center where millions of visitors come for help with their legal needs. When a consumer browses our thousands of pages of free legal content, we provide geo-targeted attorney listings related to the information our visitors are seeking. A site visitor who clicks on one of those attorney listings should be a more likely client than one who clicked on a paid Google link through a general key-word search.

Despite the promise of absolutely trackable results and metrics for every dime invested in online marketing, the age-old adage of "there are no guarantees in advertising" still rings true -- buyer beware.

SEM vs SEO - What's the difference and what does that mean for lawyer websites?

"If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it really make a sound?"  If you build a website, and no one visits, how can you generate more business online?  Okay, not quite the same comparison but still applicable for today's internet businesses. How do you promote your website once you've transitioned your law firm online?  It might be time to consider investing in some form of "Search Engine Marketing", or SEM.

Not to be confused with SEO "Search Engine Optimization", covered in a previous post on the Nolo Lawyers blog, SEM is the general practice of increasing a website's visibility in search engine results.  Most commonly, SEM refers to greater search engine visibility through pay-per-click advertising and paid placement.

SEM can be part of a comprehensive overall online strategy to boost your website's visibility in search engine results, but other important factors include unique content, link building, social media marketing, and optimizing a website via SEO. The primary function of SEM is to affect your appearance in search engine results and know that consumers can find you.

There are agencies that can help you implement an SEM program, or you can go it alone with legal directories, Google AdWords, and other forms of paid advertising. When choosing an SEO consultant, make sure to follow some if not all of these best practices.

At the end of the day, it's all about results and the ability to measure them. Make sure that you have a historical baseline of metrics before implementing an online strategy and allow time for your efforts to take hold.  For example, do you know how many unique site visitors you get each month, and what sites they most originate from?  Using a month or two's worth of data might reflect exceptions in the marketplace, or peaks and valleys with times of year, rather than a true reflection of your return on investment.  Metrics also allow you to understand what might be resonating most, or least, among potential clients, and how they're most likely to find you.