23 February 2012 No Comment

One thing any prominent attorney will tell you is that behind all great cases comes a shadow job–to be the firm’s rainmaker–because new clients are the lifeline of any firm. Building relationships, contacts, and rolodexes had been the norm until search engines changed the game entirely. Not only did the internet kill the telephone book, it’s giving small law firms a once unheard of opportunity to compete with firms thousands of times their size.Small law firms have exposed a glaring weakness in how large corporate firms optimize their firm websites for specific online searches. This practice is referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and potential clients everyday look at Washington, DC law websites and, ultimately, make million dollar decisions about which firms to hire. Since the internet killed the telephone book (I routinely ask my mail carrier to send mine back) and smart tablets and smart phones have flooded the market, it’s easier to find what you need in the palm of your hand or at your desk. In addition, while searching for the right Law Firm may have been formerly based on K St. relationships, today’s corporate young guns rely on the same tools the rest of use, specifically Google and Bing.

With large marketing budgets, we expected to see some of Washington DC’s most recognizable and largest law firm websites to also be the highest ranked online. Not only was this not the case, but it turned out that for two specific keywords, small law firms have dominated the search terms exclusively. To give you a better idea of how important keyword rank is, here is a click through rate by search page and position:

Page One – First Result: 42.3%
Remainder of Page One: 11.92%
Page Two – First Result: 8.4%
Page Three: >1%

For our search term review we focused strictly on organic search results, not paid results which fluctuate on an advertisers ad budget.

For our search term review, we focused strictly on organic search results, not paid results which fluctuate on an advertisers ad budget. The most popular keywords for attorneys are unsurprisingly “Lawyers” with 40,500 searches each month. However, potential clients don’t just search using the keyword “Lawyers”, they instead search for a particular type of attorney. So we focused on “DC Corporate Attorney” — broad enough to encompass the core business practices of many firms and a term someone at a Fortune 500 company may use to find a new legal partner in the area.

The first SEO for Law Firm that came up in using the search term “DC Corporate Attorney” was Tobin, O’Connor and Ewing, http://www.tobinoconnor.com/, According to their website this law firm has 11 attorneys.

The rest of the search results: