A few days ago we met a potential client, an attorney interested in marketing for his law firm, who asked us a lot of excellent questions that no one has asked us before. One of them was “If I decide to pay for SEO, how long before I start getting new clients?”
As with anything complex, the answer is: it depends. Here are the factors that define the start-to-success SEO time frame.
SEO for law firms is competitive in two ways: there are competitive geo markets and there are competitive practice areas.
Let’s use a metaphor to explain this one. If you start going to the gym to reach a certain body weight and look, the first thing your personal trainer would consider when designing a workout program is your starting point. If you’ve trained for a while before, eat healthy, and are in overall good shape, you’ll probably achieve your goals fairly soon. If you’re 60 pounds overweight, the process would take a lot longer and would involve a very different approach at first.
It’s the same with SEO. What is the current state of your website? Is it new or has it been live for 10 years? Was it ever optimized? Does it feature relevant content that people search for? Do you regularly upload new content? The answers to these questions will determine how long it would take an SEO expert to get your website to page one (again, no one can guarantee the result, but we have plenty of case studies proving that this can be done).
Amount of effort that goes into SEO is crucial to the speed of achieving results.
How much effort are you willing to allocate to SEO? If you’re planning to invest in SEO services for lawyers $500 per month, I can tell you right now that it won’t work. It’s not enough money for creating quality content and for distributing it. Speak with any lawyer that pays that much for SEO and they will tell you a tale about wasted money. Why? Because your competitors will outspend you and take the clients that you want.
If you invest more in SEO for law firms — anywhere between $2500-$5000 per month — your website could earn one of those coveted top 5 Google positions much faster. You’ll get a lot of well-researched, relevant, keyword-rich, high-quality content created and distributed to other relevant websites, and more of your prospects will read or watch it.
Read this to understand more about how SEO for lawyers works, so you can make an educated decision about your marketing investment.
If you work with an experienced, preferably US-based digital marketing agency, these are the approximate timeframes for achieving results with SEO (keep in mind that there are no guarantees):
We’d recommend you spend $4000-$5000 per month on SEO for attorneys. This should buy you a lot of SEO firepower! Yes, $60 000 per year on SEO alone may sound like a lot of money, but consider an average client value. If it’s $5000, then you break even on your SEO investment with just the first 12 clients, and you should have enough leads to sign many more.
For more detailed information about how to decide on the right marketing budget and what returns to expect, read this blog post.
And one last thing: the sooner you get someone to optimize your website for Google, the sooner you’ll see results. You start now: contact us here.
Comrade is a Chicago based digital marketing company that specializes in website design and marketing for attorneys. Read more about our content marketing service for law firms.
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