Why Organic Search Rankings Are MUCH more valuable then Pay Per Click

Many law firms pay in order to have top rankings at the search engines via pay per click programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing.  Each time someone clicks on the ad for a certain keyword, they pay a certain price to Google or Yahoo.  This can get very expensive if your bidding on highly competitive keywords, many times costing more then $10 per click.

Organic search engine positions on the other hand are free!  They are the gift that keep on giving and if you have one of the top 10 or 20 positons, you will get a nice flow of traffic from people that are interested in your legal services.    The organic results are the ones on the left side of the page and people tend to trust organic results more then paid results, because anyone can buy their way to the top but with organic results, you have to earn your way to the top!

EXAMPLE OF ORGANIC SEARCH ENGINE SUCCESS

I have a legal client that does both organic optimization and pay per click marketing. Here is an example of how valuable organic results are for a law firm versus pay per click results.  This firm was doing a lot of PPC marketing for bankruptcy related keywords but stopped doing it because of how high the cost was.   The cost for the term chicago bankruptcy lawyer at Google adwords is an average of $12.62 per click for a top 3 position.  Same thing for most chicago bankruptcy terms, in the $10-15 per click range.

Luckily for this client, we have been developing thier organic presense for the past few years and we not only optimized the firms main site, but we created a legal mini site for the chicago bankruptcy law practice.  So the firm has a very strong organic presence at Google and other search engines. At Google for the term chicago bankruptcy law the mini site is ranked #1 and the main site is ranked #6. So TWO top 10 listings for a competitive and very expensive keyword.  If they were paying per click and got just 20 clicks per site, it would cost more then $400 just for 40 total clicks on one keyword.

The firm gets much more then 20 clicks and are top 10 for many other keywords in the organic listings at Google.  The senior partner told me the other day that they are getting about 2-3 referrals a week for bankruptcy work and its all coming from the organic listings because they stopped the pay per click campaigns for those keywords.  So they are saving huge money on the clicks and the traffic from the organic results are resulting in new business.

Pay per click marketing is a great idea but in the long run, you must have good organic listings or your going to pay much more overall for your online advertising. We can assist your law firm with building its organic search engine presense, contact us today.