Calculate Your Revenue from a Law Firm SEO Campaign

3D illustration of the letters "SEO" with a rocket launching through the "O," symbolizing search engine optimization and growth, set against a purple background.

SEO can be expensive. Expensive but worth it. To dominate in the top rankings these days you need a good website, lots of quality content, innovative features, videos, and backlinks. All of this takes time and costs money. So before you begin a campaign, you should see how much potential revenue there is in a campaign. 

Revenue Timeline for SEO Results

Before we even start on a revenue path, note that ranking high in search results is not instant. So how long will it take? From our 20 years of experience, we break campaigns down into three categories—each with its own burn rate. 

  1. Existing Websites that need Technical Help
  2. Existing Websites that Need Authority, Content, and Technical Help
  3. Brand New Websites

Existing Websites with Technical Issues

These are rare websites. They are oftentimes firms that are sitting on a wealth of authoritative backlinks and content. Yet, they have some underlying issue preventing them from ranking high—usually technical in nature. Think of these sites as owning a gold mine but not knowing how to drill. 

They can sometimes rank instantly with a few professional fixes. The fixes can be as simple as blocking robots from indexing the site. But usually, the core issues are how the site is built with long URLs, site architecture, slow-loading pages, no proper title tags, errors, and other garbage that Google does not want in its index. 

The good news is that fixing those structural issues will instantly rank the site in just a few weeks to a few months. So, the return on investment can be immediate.

Existing Websites that Need Authority, Content, and Technical Updates

In this category, the firm has a website, but it simply lacks rankings. This is the vast majority of law firms. Technically, the site may be fine with slight improvements. They do not rank because they lack quality content and authority. These campaigns can take longer—sometimes months or years to achieve number-one rankings. 

Brand New Websites

In this category, you are staring down the same problem as an existing website that needs authority, content, and technical updates. Hopefully your website will be built with all the technical needs solved. You will probably also write enough content to start too. The real key here is needing to build your authority via backlinks. This can take time and rankings may not come instantly, except in niche areas. 

So now you know the timeline of results. Now, how much can you expect as a return on your SEO investment once you rank high? We have a chart for that. 

How to Calculate Your Return on Investment

We have an SEO Revenue Chart to help with that.

PaperStreet- Web-Design-SEO-ROI chart

Explanation of the SEO Revenue Chart

Keyword Phrase – Conduct brief research on what keyword phrases you plan to target.

Core Keyword Phrase Volume – This is the volume of search traffic for those phrases.

Variances – This is an extrapolation of variances of those phrases. For instance, if your core keyword phrase is “Miami Personal Injury Lawyer” then a variance could be “attorney” or “law firm” or just “Injury Lawyer.” Enter the phrases and volume in the appropriate columns.

Traffic – These are known click thru rates for ranking #1, #2, and #3. What we do is then average them to show where it’s possible to get traffic. Obviously, if you are #1 for all, your results could be higher by almost double. This is precisely why everyone strives for this top position.

Average Traffic – This is the actual traffic you will get from ranking with an average of 1, 2, and 3 ranking. This can be altered as needed. 

Conversion Rate – We put a very conservative estimate in this area for the amount of leads you will get from traffic at 5%. If your website converts at 25% then put that number here. 

Signing Rate – This is the rate at which you sign a client from a lead. Some firms are great at sales and sign 50% or more of clients who contact them. Some firms do not and only retain 10%. Fill in your numbers, and you will see the number of clients to expect.

Average Case Value – Plug in your average case value on this chart. 

Total – This is your total revenue from signing clients from that month.

Let’s Recap

SEO can take time. You need to know your investment will pay off. Use the chart to calculate what top rankings could bring in for your firm. 

If your total revenue exceeds your total investment, then you have a positive return for the SEO campaign. If not, you need to figure out a new plan, new website, new agency, new tactics, or new keyword phrases to target.

Contact

Want a free analysis to see if SEO makes sense?  Contact Us, and we will give you free keyword research and create a chart for your firm.

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