By Chris (Tres) Homer
At GNGF, we pride ourselves in stepping back and analyzing the whole situation. We have a great team of campaign engineers who are all Analytics certified and Adwords certified who enjoy digging through data all day. It is precisely this data that we use to create a strategy that’s unique to every single client, and it is what drives all of the work that we do.
You have goals for your law firm. Maybe you want to hire two new attorneys by the end of the year. Maybe you want to open that second office location like you’ve wanted to do for years. Maybe you just want to be busier tomorrow than you were today. These are all things that come out of our extensive branding process that we walk through with our clients. We want to know what your goals are so that we can create unique strategies to help move your online presence in a direction that will put you closer to your goals.
Nothing grinds my gears more than spending multiple workdays creating, refining, and presenting these strategies, only to have them change a month or two into the process. The main reason for this premature change in strategy? A lack of patience.
Patience. It is a necessity in the world of online marketing. Unless you are paying for each click (PPC), the data that you receive from your online marketing efforts is not immediately apparent. Most of the time, it takes between two and three months after making changes to a website to see the fruits of your labor.
I compare these strategies to a knee surgery. If you tear a muscle in your knee, you can still move around but not like you used to or without pain. There is something on the site that needs improved in order to help your entire site overall. Therefore, your site must undergo surgery, as in removing old content, refining or tweaking existing content, and sometimes even completely overhauling a section of your site. Once you finish with your surgery, you are not able to jump out of the hospital bed and run a marathon. In fact, you can’t even walk without help. Your site is the same way. We have to take your site to physical therapy where we monitor its every move.
After a couple of months of therapy, your site is finally able to walk again, and then it’s even able to run again. Your site is hopefully better off than it was before and is ready to tackle more problems. But, we will not know that until we monitor and track every change we made.
Now, a change we make today on your site—whether that change is adding new content or simply adjusting some onsite layout—will take time to affect the user experience, the search engine, or the website health. It is imperative that we make our changes, then step back and monitor.
This is where patience comes into play. I understand that you want results now. You want people to start calling you today. You want to beat your rival online in a week. If that is what you want, and you are unable to wait for the results, then we can’t help you.
Once we begin a strategy, we can’t change it, barring crazy circumstances, like a partner leaving the firm or a sudden office move. If we begin moving from strategy to strategy without being able to measure the success of what we’ve done, we are just spitting into the wind. We are throwing 50 darts at a dartboard at once and trying to differentiate why the one dart hits that triple 20 and the others don’t.
It isn’t healthy and it is something that we do not do.
When you decide to work with us, you are committing to long-term success, not a short-term sprint. Everything we do is setting you up to start answering more phone calls nine to 12 months into the year. The reason it takes time is because we do things the way they are supposed to be done. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if it were, it wouldn’t have stood for 1,200 years in all of its glory.
It is ok to ask questions, and actually it is encouraged. It is ok to ask for updates on a regular basis. These types of communication show you care and have a vested interest in everything we do for you. But please, please, please (please), do not change our strategy until we are ready.
We genuinely care about your success. We are on your side. We want you to be successful and grow. To be honest, we are really damn good at what we do. It is up to you to have patience and trust our strategies.
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