Insights
Thought Leadership Alert: Trump's Trade War
The Trump administration’s tariff policies are shaking the global economy and redefining international trade relations. If your law firm has a substantial international trade practice, you've probably been considering a ramp-up in up your online content marketing around these policies. Now that it appears that the current course of action is here to stay, it's time to take a deeper dive on what the data says and determine where the marketing opportunities lie.
Our recent research [as of 7/9/2018] shows it is not too late to get in on this topic. Keywords involving the tariffs and policies are presently producing results that suggest that it is still possible to play the front-runner. Well-crafted landing pages, blogs, and microsites all have a good chance to pay dividends. While the mainstream media dominates searches on broad generalized topics, any narrowing of a query to include the legal ramifications of these policies shows that the target is far from saturated. There’s a lot of opportunity for your law firm to appear on the first page of Google results.
Presently ranking in organic searches are just a handful of small boutique firms and a smattering of big law pages. Crowell Moring in particular seems to have the right idea with its collection of blog posts. But even across all of the results pages for this topic, the domain and the page authority of high ranking pages is actually rather low, and with a little elbow grease your firm can rank highly.
Google reports that the search volume on these keywords and key phrases is still fairly modest, but these metrics are measured by the average monthly number of searches for any particular term over an entire year. That doesn’t tell you much about quickly emerging topics, and by the time a keyword or key phrase reports as being popular, it may be too high to give chase.
One of the key metrics that makes this particular opportunity interesting is the high organic click-through rate. The percentage of people who actually clicked through from Google to a resulting search record is showing as well over 80 percent. Interest parties – including potential clients – are searching on these topics with intent, and when they find what they’re looking for, they’re clicking through.
Right now there's virtually no competition with Google AdWords. A modest pay-per-click (PPC) strategy for many of these keywords and phrases will buy you the top spot in the sponsored listings. This will boost your visibility immediately while your organic SEO efforts have time to kick in. Then, as search terms become more popular and the sponsored listings in PPC becomes more costly, you may choose to drop out knowing that you've already gained good traction with organic search results.
Act quickly, employ a solid strategy, use good digital marketing techniques, and your firm can net strong results while the barriers to entry are still low.