Las Vegas lawyers - attorneys legal directory
It Isn't Only the Numbers!
By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI co-owner of http://www.websitetrafficbuilders.com
If you have a business and an email account, you no doubt get lots of spam,
both through email and phone, promoting various tricks to get more traffic
to your site, a listing on a site at extremely low cost, a national
directory listing, or even an exclusive ad or web page just for your city or
state.
Working with many real estate and legal sites, our clients constantly inform
us of these offers that all seem too good to be true. Over a period of one
year we have investigated some of these offers and were not at all surprised
to find that the chance of getting new business from them was comparable to
handing out your business cards at a local shopping mall. Actually, this may
not be a righteous analogy, as you might get a new client at the mall!
First, let’s look at the very inexpensive listing in either a national or
local Internet directory. We asked one San Diego real estate agent why she
was listed in a specific national real estate directory. She replied, "It
was just $20 with my picture included.” Our second question asked if she
received any leads or direct business from this listing. Answer: "No!" She
had been listed with this site for nearly a year.
The lesson to be understood here is that it's not the cost that is
important, but the potential for getting new clients! Almost any high school
student can set up an inexpensive, and attractive website 'directory'. Now,
if they named it the Jimmy Jones High School Law Directory, not too many
lawyers would even consider a $20 listing (unless it was for a school
support function). However, slap on a name like The Western States Legal
Internet Bureau, and some will surely say “Well it's inexpensive; it's worth
a try.”
Sometimes these sites will discuss how much traffic they receive. Even
though this figure may sound high, here are some facts to consider:
A. Pay no regard to any figures quoting 'Hits.’ Depending on the graphics on
a web page, one visitor to a page with 15 graphics, will show as 15 hits.
B. You should find out the number of 'unique visitors' or 'visits' to
determine a much more accurate traffic count. Plus, as the saying goes,
“talk is cheap,” so be sure to look at some type of site traffic log to
verify the numbers. Below is a such a log for our own site,
www.websitetrafficbuilders.com:
The above table shows 1,455,803 hits and 58,370 total visits for the month.
Keep in mind, numbers can be easily changed before to publication. So, just
use this as an indicator in your decision matrix.
C. How is the sites traffic produced? Where is the traffic coming from? So,
a site shows you had the 58,000 visitors last month. Impressive? Maybe,
maybe not! Look at the actual traffic table below:
For May: 8,170 visits, June: 58,370. July: 10,521. See something weird? Why
the huge jump in June traffic? As an experiment, we tried an offer to have
one of our sites pages visited 50,000 times in June. Sure, we received the
50,000 'visits,’ but, were they real people as the offer stated or from
another computer-generated program which 'visited’ the site? Perhaps,
someone in Asia received a dime each time they visited the site. We highly
doubt any real people actually visited the site.
Our average site traffic runs 8 to 10 thousand per month, all coming from
high search engine keyword rankings. This traffic generates a predictable
number of sales and a much higher number of free trial software downloads
from the site.
D. Just know, high traffic to a national directory may not equate to high
traffic for your regional business. Many real estate agents and attorneys
only do business in their local city. In a national directory, one should
validate how much traffic comes in for your particular locale, as anything
else is not going to be meaningful.
So, with the above points in mind, how do you distinguish a true
cost-effective site on which to advertise? The absolute best way is to see
if the site has useful, high keyword phrase standings on the major search
engines. As an example, during July 2002, our Los Angeles/Orange County
legal directory (www.la-orange-county-lawyers-attorney-directory.com) showed
these keyword standings on Yahoo (only a partial listing):
Just clicking on the Yahoo Web Pages name will take the interested
advertiser to the Yahoo search engine. Once there, enter the individual
keyword phrases shown above in their search box and verify the results!
The second best way to determine website credibility and efficiency is to
look for testimonials on the site or on their sign-up form. Contact these
people to verify their results. In this same vein, whether you are a real
estate agent or lawyer, look for fellow practitioners in your town who are
listed on the site and contact them.
The Internet is good judgment in evaluating various advertising
opportunities. Caveat Emptor is alive and thriving on the Internet.
This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorized use, copying or
mirroring is prohibited.
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