Legal Search Marketing

Many lawyers I talk with are confused by the many different search engine terms and abreviations, most don’t know what SEO or PPC mean and below are some of the more important definitions to know in search engine marketing.

search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search (PPC).

search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they’ve entered their query into the search box. This page lists several Web pages related to the searcher’s query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.

Usually the results on the left side of the page are the organic results and the results on the right side of the page are usually paid or sponsored ads.

spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the Web, visiting Web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine’s index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a "crawler" or a "bot."

title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific Web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

The title tag is one of the most important elements to SEO and most law firm sites will not have unique title tags and instead will have no title tag or a one word title that doesnt even match the page.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

cost per click (CPC): Also called Pay per Click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won’t be shown based on the searcher’s location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

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