Webinar: Search Term Myths and Avoiding the Big Pond

Let's say you practice DUI defense law in Los Angeles, California. How many DUI defense lawyers do you think are in that wee little town? Ballpark, let's say half a million. (We're only half-serious.) If you search for "Los Angeles DUI defense attorney" on Google, what'll you find? A really big pond. The odds of you appearing on the first page of Google's search results for those terms are about as good as mine are of convincing Taylor Swift to be the mother of my children -- not very high. What should you be looking for instead?

Long-Tail, Short-Tail, and Being the Big Fish

The term "Los Angeles DUI defense attorney" is what we in the biz call a "short-tail" or "head term" phrase. Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google when clients search for that head terms. Care to guess what percentage of traffic comes from head term phrases? One point three percent of website traffic. Plus, only 1.6 percent of people making searches actually click on results for these terms. You're basically trying to be a big fish in a massive ocean -- on the moon. It makes sense too. A client has a unique problem, he goes to Google, searches for "Los Angeles DUI lawyer," realizes that the results are too general, and then he modifies his query. That's where long-tail searches come in. If that same guy is searching for "Los Angeles DUI mandatory breathalyzer company cars," to find out what happens if he drives a company car, there's going to be a lot fewer pages, and hopefully, one of those pages is yours. Big fish. Small pond. Located in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. In other words, client contact. Long-tail searches make up 31.8 percent of traffic by the way, and have a click rate of 6 percent, per FindLaw's white paper, "The Futility of Chasing Silver Bullets."

Webinar: Thinking Big: Better Leveraging Search -- and More -- to Supercharge Your Firm's Marketing Efforts

How do you capitalize on this little nugget of knowledge, and become the big fish in a small pond in the middle of downtown L. A.? FindLaw has a webinar coming up on Wednesday, March 26th, 2014, at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. CT to discuss the studies underlying the paper, and how to re-jigger your firm's marketing strategy to avoid the trap of targeting "head term" phrases. Register today, for free, at LawyerMarketing.com. Related Resources:

• Don't Let Your Firm Be Blinded by Marketing Myths (FindLaw Lawyer Marketing)
• What's Your Facebook Marketing Strategy in the Pay to Play Era? (FindLaw's Strategist Blog)
• Your Law Firm Website is (Probably) Designed to Fail (FindLaw's Strategist Blog)