What’s the Point of Ranking First Among Organic Search Results If No One Clicks on Your Site?

If you have been writing content for your website for the purposes of optimizing its rankings among organic search results on search engine results pages (SERPs), you are probably used to thinking in terms of how many clicks your awesome content will attract. When you hear the phrase, “content is king,” you probably interpret “king” as meaning “that which attracts the most clicks.” Higher SERP rankings lead to more clicks, which in turn lead to higher SERP rankings, creating a virtuous circle. What if, after putting all that work into writing eminently clickable prose, you found out that clicks aren’t everything? What if search engine optimization (SEO) doesn’t mean making information seekers click on your law firm’s website? What if, instead, it means creating legal blog content so elegantly and immediately informative that prospective clients don’t even have to click on your website, or on any websites at all?

Should You Aspire to Get All of the Clicks, or None of Them?

SEO is always evolving; if it were not, then content marketing educators would have worked themselves out of a job decades ago. Getting an edge over your competitors in content marketing means doing what Google’s algorithms want in 2021 while the other law firms in town are still catering to the tastes of Google’s 2019 bots, or perhaps, in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, adding the word “pandemic” to the end of long-tail keywords.

You may have noticed that snippets tend to appear at the top of SERPs these days. Your goal should now be to make Google’s bots create snippets out of the content on your site. SERP snippets are a product of their time; they aim to give readers the information they need in an instant. Clicking on websites belongs to the era of sitting at a computer. Today’s Internet users want to know “how much does a divorce cost San Antonio” fast enough that they can glance at the answer on their smartphone and then look back at the road before a cop can suspect them of distracted driving. Clicking on websites is for people old enough to remember dial-up modems.

If you create snippet worthy content and Google’s bots turn it into a snippet, it will mean fewer visitors to your website, but the people who read your snippet and consequently don’t click on your site also will not click on your competitors’ sites. Of course, snippets aren’t everything. Time on page still matters, so you still want people to navigate to your blog posts and read the post all the way through. People who fill out contact forms on your site still represent a substantial portion of new clients. In summary, you need some people to click on your site and others to read your snippet and not click on anyone’s site.

Content Marketing Isn’t Just About Clicks Anymore

Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create blog content that will answer readers’ questions succinctly while also making them want to keep reading.