Does SEO relate to law-firm success?
Chart by Stephen Ravenscraft
Just how related is new law firm business to the firm’s internet presence–its level of search engine optimization? “I get asked this all the time and haven’t had an answer,” says Conrad Saam, vice chair of the ABA’s Social Media, Blogs and Websites Interest Group. “So we turned to the data.”
Using advanced call tracking, Saam’s firm, Mockingbird Marketing, looked at calls generated by visits originating from search engines and compared that number to the total number of SEO visits. The study looked at 29 law firms, 16 of them personal injury firms, which would likely get more first-time callers through the internet.
The study found a correlation coefficient of .70. (For those not conversant in statistics and regression analysis, if 1 represents a perfect correlation and 0 no relation, .70 is pretty strong.)
And while there was wide diversity in the number of new calls generated by 100 search sessions, the median was 3.35 calls, or “more than three calls from new numbers for each 100 SEO sessions,” Saam says. And for PI law firms, that number increased to 4.5 new calls.
This article originally appeared in the August 2016 issue of the ABA Journal with this headline: “Does SEO Relate to Success? Study finds strong tie between search engine visits and new phone calls to firms.”
See more practice stats at ABAJournal.com/Lawbythenumbers.
