Fast, Cheap or Good – You Can Only Have Two When It Comes to Digital Marketing

As an Internet marketing company that’s been around since the early days of the Internet (1999, to be exact), we have helped A LOT of attorneys over the years establish a stronger digital web presence. Some of our clients have come to us without a lot of experience in marketing themselves while others have varying degrees of online marketing expertise. Regardless of their online savvy, almost every prospective client ends up asking the seemingly unavoidable (and practically unanswerable) question:

How quickly is my website going to rank on page one?

Trust us when we tell you that ANY marketing firm that gives you a specific answer to this question isn’t being truthful with you…

For one, no two websites are alike, and unless the marketing firm you’re talking to has done an extensive website audit, it isn’t going to be able to give you a realistic answer as to when your site may begin to improve in rankings. Notice we said, “improve in rankings” and didn’t even mention page one of Google. Since no one can control or guarantee Google search rankings other than Google itself, it really isn’t a marketing firm’s place to “guarantee” a page one rank that it may or may not be able to deliver on.

When it comes down to it, Google and other search engines are the only entities that can control online rankings. Each individual search engine has its own unique algorithms in place to make the search placement process fair. No one truly knows the exact metrics that these algorithms consider, but search engines, namely Google, do offer a set of guidelines they highly recommend online users follow.

Even knowing the above, there are still companies that claim they can get your website to the top of page one on Google. They do this, knowing the only real way to accomplish it quickly – but not accurately or professionally – is through pay-per-click. Yes, it is possible for a website to show up at the top of page one on Google almost overnight provided the owner of said website is willing to pay for Ad Placement. For many law firms, PPC costs, especially for the most competitive keywords, can quickly reach five figures in any given month. Those costs, on top of the baseline fees that most digital marketing firms charge can have a huge impact on your company’s bottom line, and your yield on return may not even justify the cost in the first place.

At SLS Consulting, we invest our time and resources into organic SEO. We improve search placement for our clients because we implement white hat marketing principles that Google and other major search engines prefer. Instead of asking our clients to pay for their search placement via AdWords budgets, we build a strong SEO foundation that will perform for the long haul – day in, day out. Like anything worthwhile, this process isn’t quick, and the number of hours that may be required to properly lay the foundation certainly doesn’t make the process cheap. So, what we tell each one of our clients is simple – we can get you the search rankings you’re interested in, but we’re going to need time to do it. In the same way that our firm is committed to doing the best job possible, our clients must commit to the process. Not only is it always cheaper in the long run, but it’s built with algorithm updates in mind, and the likelihood that search placement will seriously be impacted is minimal at best.

The bottom line is simple when it comes to any online marketing campaign – whether you are selling widgets or legal aid. If you want your marketing campaign to succeed not just today, but tomorrow, it’s going to take time, and it will incur more of a cost. Any Internet marketing company that tells you otherwise either:

1) isn’t going to do a good job, although it may be fast and cheap;

2) is going to be cheap, which means they’re probably not going to do a good job with it because it’s being rushed; or

3) is going to do the job too quickly, which means you’re probably not going to get quality work from them. Good, cheap, and fast…you can only have two of them, and anytime you incorporate cheap into the mix, you’re doing so at the expense of quality time being put into quality work.

At SLS Consulting, we produce quality work on behalf of our clients. We never rush the process, and we never give our clients unrealistic expectations on how quickly their websites are going to start ranking and/or converting better. If you’re interested in hearing how we can help your legal marketing campaign, contact us today to schedule a free website audit.