Search Engine Basics

Today, search engine marketing is an integral part of many litigation firms' and vendors' marketing strategies. This post will give a basic overview to some who may be less familiar with the topic, rather than attempt to get into the many intricacies involved in managing a succesful program.

Search engine strategies can be divided into 2 simple categories:

(1) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Simply described, SEO is leveraging the arrangement of words and links contained on your Web site, in order to achieve a higher ranking on a search engine. Over the last 10 years the SEO market has skyrocketed. When I first became involved with marketing in the legal space, back in 1998, SEO was the first marketing tactic I was responsible for managing. Back then, there were only a handful of firms specializing in this. Today there are offshore companies and a number of companies that handle this within a specific business niche. For example, most trial lawyer conference will have several vendors that specialize in SEO, or in online marketing generally.

(2) Search Engine Marketing (SEM) This is actually nothing more than paying to place text advertising on search engines when specific words are inputted into the search engine. Businesses essentially try to outbid each other to place their ads higher on search results and achieve more clickthroughs than the competition. Yes, this pretty much all there is behind the disgustingly brilliant and simple business model that is almost singlehandedly responsible for Google and Yahoo's Billions. Get the entire world to use your search engine and have every business compete for qualified traffic seeking the products and services they are offering online.
Today, there are many firms that handle SEO, SEM and other online marketing and many traditional ad agencies have developed expertise in online mediums.

I can spend days speaking on SEO and SEM, having leveraged both as part of prior business online marketing strategies and understanding the intricacies involved. While I do have to sleep at some point, I will offer one tip with respect to each. However, if you have any particular questions on the subject, I would be happy to provide answers via e-mail.

Tip 1: If SEO is a major source of lead opportunities for your business, do the ROI math and invest the appropriate capital into a firm to stay on top of this for you. Some firms will consider partial incentives based on ranking performance - I would lean toward a win-win arrangement like this.

Tip 2: Studies have shown that there is no such thing as optimal position in SEM. The optimal position is the one that gets you the most leads at the lowest investment. (In other words, traffic that clicks through when you are ad link #1, does not behave any differently that traffic clicking through ad link #5). The difference is it will cost you less to be link #5 and likely get less traffic. If it costs you 1/5 of the price and you get half the traffic, it may be prudent to consider going for link #5, unless your market share strategy dictates otherwise