You know that good search engine optimization (SEO) is important to your law firm’s visibility. You’re on top of the marketing trends and from personal experience you know how often people ask Google for something “near me” and don’t look beyond the top options listed.
What you’re not sure of is how much you should be paying for good SEO work.
Reliable estimates place the range of monthly cost at $2,000 on the low end to as much as $20,000 on the high end. Let’s take a look at the things that impact the size of a law firm SEO budget and why the benefits are worth the price.
What factors impact the range?
Whether you’re closer to $2K or $20 grand depends on a range of factors. Your practice area is one. If you’re a personal injury firm, then competition on the keywords is going to be very high. The battle won’t be quite as fierce if you do wills and estates.
The market you’re trying to reach will also be significant. If you’re a couple hours outside the nearest major city, surrounded by other small towns, then competition is less. But if you’re fighting for access to the searches of residents in and around the large market then it will be different. Not only do big cities have more law firms, they also have the big ones—you know, the ones with the seemingly bottomless marketing budgets.
What you get
When you make a significant investment in your SEO, you’re getting the security of knowing that professionals are staying on top of your website each and every day. It’s important to emphasize that SEO is not a “one-off.” Yes, there are things that can be done just once—like getting listed in the major directories. But Google gives greater credence to websites that are being consistently worked on.
That means steadily producing new content. It means keeping the technical end of your website clean—you’d be surprised how fast things like broken links pile up. Errors on the back end of the site can be like that pile of dishes in your sink—you wonder where it came from after the kitchen was so spotless just a couple days ago. Good SEO firms have a tech expert constantly loading the dishwasher, so to speak, and making sure your site’s code and structure are always sharp and clean when the algorithms come crawling.
A good investment in SEO also ensures that you’re getting things done in the right way. As a lawyer, you know all too well how some bad apples can give an entire profession a bad name. SEO is no different—you can find someone who will run your digital marketing for a dirt cheap price and promise grand results.
But the only way they’ll get those results is through so-called “black hat” tactics—keyword stuffing, spammy links and other methods that have been clearly frowned on by Google and will get your site banned from search listings altogether once the search algorithms catch on. And they always do.
SEO is a long-term play. Get a good firm, make a reasonable investment and do it right, and you’ll reap the benefits for years to come.
