When will the phone start ringing?

So you hired an SEO firm to help increase the traffic to your website. But despite sending a check, the phone at your Family Law firm has yet to start ringing and the traffic to the site is low.

• Why is that?
• When will the phone/website traffic increase?
• What should your expectations be for the first six to nine months?

Why?

In the beginning of a project your search rankings will improve, but the rankings will not be high enough for people to find you. This is because people tend not to click on a search result if it is listed beyond page one or two in the search results. However, as your rankings continue to improve, the traffic to the site will start to increase and the phone will start to ring. So in the first few months, an important indicator of success is the rate of improvement in your search rankings. If a month or two has gone by and your search rankings have improved dramatically that is a very good sign that the SEO process is working and that your traffic will increase soon.

The only way to know that the rankings are improving is to measure the rankings each month. We recommend that you rank a list of keyword phrases at the beginning of the SEO process and track your progress each month. The SEO process requires a little patience and seeing progress in your rankings each month will help you stay the course.

When?

Most of my Family Law attorney clients will ask me; when will the phone start ringing consistently? Phone traffic tends to increase in-line with increases in absolute unique visitors. (Unique means if a person visits the site 10 times they are still counted as one visitor) In my experience working with Collaborative Family law websites the magic number seems to be 150 absolute unique visitors. When a site receives 150 unique visitors a month the phone may ring once or twice a week. My expectation at the start of any project is for the traffic to increase to 150 to 250 unique visitors per month in about six to nine months from when the site goes live.

Expectations

I don't guarantee the numbers above. They are at best educated guesses, because there are many variables outside of our span of control that affect the final outcome. Having said that, I think the numbers I listed above represent reasonable goals for the first 6-9 months.

Paid for Advertising as a short term measure

For our clients who are looking for immediate results we recommend a six month Pay for Click campaign. With a PPC campaign you get immediate results, but have to pay each time someone clicks on your listing. This is not ideal, but for some it is an effective measure for achieving faster results.