A LAWYER MOVED HIS WEBSITE TO A .ATTORNEY DOMAIN NAME. HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED.
Eric Block is a personal injury attorney in Jacksonville, Florida. While he’s handled many cases and clients expertly, he was having trouble getting the word out about his law practice. The market for legal services in Northeast Florida is highly competitive; other attorneys and firms were spending millions of dollars a year in ads. How would he compete without massive radio and television spends? Eric decided to take an innovative online marketing approach by relaunching his website under www.Jacksonville.Attorney, which led to impressive returns at a fraction of the cost of a major advertising campaign.
Globe Runner was hired by Rightside, the registry behind the new gTLD domain extension .ATTORNEY, to review Mr. Block’s website migration from his former website and domain name, www.EricBlockLaw.com, to his new website and domain name, www.Jacksonville.Attorney. We reviewed the results, and reported it all in a case study. You can learn more about it on Rightside’s blog titled Domains vs. pay per click: Do new TLDs work?, or download the PDF file at the end of this post.
Marketing legal services is extremely competitive, and costs are often high as a result. An October 2015 U.S. Chamber Institute of Legal Reform report on trial lawyer marketing stated that:
“[l]egal advertising and marketing communications are a multi-prong, highly sophisticated undertaking by trial lawyers that spans broadcast and digital venues. This is not a resource-starved, grassroots effort but a very much well-funded and coordinated endeavor.” They went on to say that “online legal key word advertising is among the most expensive in America.”
Nine of the top 10 and 23 of the top 25 most expensive Google keywords are related to legal services. Furthermore, most of the search terms are tied to lawyers in specific states. An attorney might use Google AdWords to bid on keywords such as “accident” and “personal injury” along with a combination of state names, state abbreviations, and specific city names.
Rather than spend thousands every month to drive traffic to his website via PPC, Mr. Block listed his services on FindLaw and Avvo, popular attorney-listing websites. He worked with New York-based Momentum Names, a reseller of Rightside’s new generic Top Level Domains (TLDs) such as .LAWYER and .ATTORNEY.
Eric decided to move to www.Jacksonville.Attorney, and launched the new website in March of 2015. As you can see from the Google Analytics’ graph show above, the move to the .ATTORNEY domain name was a success.
While no data can serve as 100-percent proof that moving from EricBlockLaw.com to Jacksonville.Attorney caused Eric’s website to go to in the top of the search results, the uptick in organic traffic is certainly striking. Jacksonville.Attorney is now ranked for more than 300 keyword phrases according to SEMrush.com. Within one month of launching, the new website showed up on the first page of search results for “Jacksonville Attorney.” Jacksonville.Attorney appears higher than other competitors despite lower-quality in-bound links (Majestic.com Trust Flow) and a shorter history, both of which are key search engine ranking factors.
