Outdated Digital Marketing Trends to Ditch in 2020

As the year draws to a close, you and your colleagues at your law firm are probably thinking about ways to cut your marketing expenses for 2020, or at least to get a better return on your current spending on marketing. Now is a good time to review your current digital marketing plan and find out if you are spending money on services that are not bringing in new clients or improving the SEO rankings of your site. In the spirit of year-end lists of what’s in and what’s out for the new year, these are some outdated digital marketing tactics that ought to go the way of the Geocities site.

Focusing Too Much on Clicks to Measure Your Website’s Performance

The number of clicks on your site is not the most accurate indicator of prospective clients’ engagement with it. By themselves, clicks are cheap; anyone can click. Babies can click. Bots can click. Gig workers paid a pittance can spend their entire workday clicking. Certain enterprising geeks have set up “click farms” where dozens of phones of questionable intelligence click on websites, day and night, for a fraction of a cent per minute. These clicks are worth about as much as the people and devices who perform them get paid for them. Instead, you should focus on how much time visitors spend on your page and how many of them click “submit” on your “contact us” form.

Email Marketing

By 2019, most people have gotten used to ignoring promotional emails; Gmail even sends them directly to a glorified spam folder. Your marketing budget is better spent on building a mobile-friendly website and updating it regularly with genuinely informative content. You should send email only to people who really want it; people are much more likely to become paying clients if you personally write them an email in response to their query on your contact form than if you send out impersonal email blasts to everyone whose email address you have managed to harvest.

Black Hat SEO

Google has long since wised up to website owners’ attempts to game its search result ranking algorithm; in fact, every update to its algorithm includes new ways to get around strategies that website builders have found for cheating the previous version of the algorithm. The old black hat SEO tactics, such as typing a keyword dozens of times in a color of text that matches the background of the page are so outdated that it seems ridiculous that anyone would try them. If you plaster your site with invisible keywords, Google will be as impressed with you as you were with your Grandpa when he told you that he cheated on a test in middle school by sticking silly putty on the test paper of the kid next to him to copy his answers.

Legal Content Writers

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