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Does A Client Really Care if Your Firm Has Great SEO? Higbee dba RecordGone.com Does.

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It must have been a slow news day for self-described upstart small law firm, Higbee Associates dba RecordGone. What else could inspire the firm to issue this bizarre press release Press Release, trumpeting the firm's Alexa search engine ranking of 127,628 and boasting that the ranking outscores any of the top ten largest firms? For starters, who uses large law firms as a metric of anything Internet or Web 2.0 related anyway? Large law firms don't have much interest in SEO, so beating them on that scale doesn't mean much in my book. But more importantly, why should potential clients care one way or another whether a law firm that provides records expungement services has a high search engine ranking?

The other drawback to boasting about SEO is that it invites investigation by intrepid bloggers like me. I went to Alexa to check RecordGone's ranking, but confirmed that it is indeed around 127,628. Then, I ran some organic searches on Google and found the following results for RecordGone:

Expunging criminal records (no top page listing on Google)

"expunge" and criminal records (#10 on first page of Google)

how can I expunge my criminal record (no top page Google listing)

criminal record expunge - (#2 top page of Google).

Since prospective clients will likely use all of the above search phrases, RecordGone's 50-50 track record for first page listings isn't much to boast about, in my view.

Fixating on and understanding SEO rankings and page traffic may be interesting, but in the end, it's results that count - the quality of the traffic generated, not sheer quantity. RecordGone.com may have a pretty good Alexa ranking, but so what? Based on my own non-scientific study, my guess is that the firm is missing out on a large chunk of potential traffic by "being gone" from the first page of Google in several plausible search engine scenarios.

Full post as published by My Shingle.com on April 22, 2009 (boomark / email).