Your Website’s Job – Reach the long tail searcher
Most people when they begin searching for products start very broad, example “big screen tv”. This behavior also carries over when they are looking for services, example “lawyer”. To illustrate the point, in the month of December 2009, the term “lawyer” was searched 11.1 million times and “lawyers” 7.48 million times according to Google AdWords. This is a surprising stat considering most people will hire an attorney within a 15 mile radius of where they live.
So someone who would type “lawyer” into the search box will receive 90,200,000 results on their screen. No matter how well optimized your website is, let’s be frank, your website doesn’t have much of a chance being on the first page. The next step for this searcher is to do one of two things – 1) visit a directory (like Lawyers.com) or 2) refine their search. Now, the importance of your website comes into play.
Wordtracker has a great study on their website that illustrates the importance of optimizing your website for rankings on long tail searches. The main take away from this study is that lead conversion and efficiency of rankings dramatically increases the more targeted the search. A natural conclusion when you consider the likeliness of generating a new client from a “dayton bankruptcy lawyer” searcher than a “bankruptcy lawyer” searcher.
