This is quite possibly the most controversial thing you’ll hear about SEO and paid ads. We believe it may also be the most beneficial.
One who went from barely surviving to getting an 8x return on their marketing investment and the other a 10x return in their first year alone …
The answer is simple: They all made it to the top of Google Maps, and their phone began to ring off the hook.
If not, read on …
Something was off and their impossibly low revenues showed it.
Carlton Smith (who by the way makes his living from doing SEO for lawyers is about to tell you something pretty controversial to his practice).
But … before he does … he asks two simple things of you:
Everything has gone mobile, and if you aren’t highly placed on Google Maps, you are losing massive amounts of business and cold hard cash-to your competitors-every single day.
Carlton’s message is really quite simple: He wants you to know that as an SEO provider for the past 9+ years, he has seen exactly what works, what doesn’t work and everything in between. He’s helped grow sleepy practices into powerhouses of revenue. But he learned along the way that the vast majority of what you spend on marketing is completely wasted.
Why? Let him tell you about this important discovery in his own words:
So Carlton has meticulously tested these three observations over the past several years and came to the conclusion that:
It’s estimated that if you are in the top 3 positions on Maps for the major keyword terms searched by your potential client, you stand to take down 50% or more of the traffic for that keyword.
Compare that with the measily 3-5% traffic you have to share with every other advertiser on Google Adwords. Oh and … pay dearly for the position of that placement.
Once they get to your site, you are lucky if you are converting 1 in 10 visitors to a paying client.
What’s this mean? Thousands down the drain trying to acquire new clients.
Not only does a highly ranked Google Maps listing get 10x or more the amount of traffic as paid ads and organic search results, but it converts for you.
Most SEO firms will promise law firms the moon … or at least a top maps listing and it just never happens. Why? Because ranking highly on Maps is a science. It’s completely different than SEO. It has it’s own set of rules. It’s literally a battle, and the best armed people win. Now once that listing is ranked, we aren’t done. You have to then make sure it stays there AND you must get frequent good reviews to stand out among the other 6 competitors. But if you do this-new clients are yours for the choosing. Those potential clients, searching for services like yours are going to pick you. Your client sees your listing, sees all the review stars, clicks through, reads reviews … Picks up the phone, pre-sold … ready to hire you.
It works and it works very, very well. So well, that you could cut your entire paid ad budget down, and SEO budget and just rely on Maps. But not so fast. It’s not an easy task to get lawyer listings ranked on Maps … and it’s no easy task to keep them there.