Publishing on the ExpertHub Network: Focus on the Long Tail

ExpertHub's mission, since we started, has always focused on 2 things:

1. Help consumers find high quality information about their legal/elective medical issue
2. Help local professionals build their business and their brand

We accomplish that mission by publishing information online with an eye towards having it found via organic search. Whether or not we author the article or we are providing topic suggestions to our members who publish their articles on on our network, we generally focus on the long tail of keyword topics. Here is a quick summary of the buckets of keywords that we target:

A couple things that we have learned:

• Head terms are great - we rank for a lot of them. They convert to leads at very high rates. However, if you limit yourself to focusing your SEO efforts on head terms, you're likely to be disappointed and you are setting your business up for failure as Google changes its algorithm regularly.
  
  
• Most attorneys websites only rank for name searches. This will be the leading category of keywords for any law firm spending a "reasonable" amount of money on SEO. For most attorneys, it will be the only category.
  
  
• Most attorneys are fixated on keywords associated with local searches (i.e. "cleveland divorce lawyer."). No doubt that these are valuable searches. They are also incredibly competitive. If you want to rank for these phrases (or if you currently do rank and you want to maintain that ranking), you need to have a viable link building strategy. You also need to understand how to use the Google Local Business Center. We'll show you how your ExpertHub profile can help you with both of those in a later post. However, what's most interesting about local searches is how many attorneys assume that this is the only way that consumers use the internet to find a lawyer. The reality could not be further from the truth.
  
  
• If you want traffic and leads (which is really what most attorneys want out of the Internet), then you should pay attention to topic searches. Why? See below:

• The vast majority of internet traffic - over 2/3 - of search traffic is for topic searches.
  
  
• Although the conversion rate (lead/visitor) for topic searches is lower than for local searches, if you have a low cost publishing approach, the overall cost/lead will be much lower for topic searches than it will be for local searches.

Of course, you want to rank for as many keywords as possible. Search behavior is changing rapidly every year and you want to make sure that your firm is plugged into the search stream. Our publishing platform in combination with our network of websites is truly a unique asset that will allow you to make sure that your firm is poised to take advantage of the Internet to generate new business.

To learn more, contact us today.