If you’ve looked into any kind of marketing for your law firm, you’ve likely been told time and time again that you should focus on SEO if you want your firm to grow. For years, firms have been laser-focused on SEO and getting higher rankings on Google. Marketing companies continue to push this idea and place it at the core of their marketing strategy.

But what if your SEO is already good enough?

Focusing on SEO is certainly one way to go about growing a firm, but if it’s what every firm is doing, you’re facing an uphill battle for very limited real estate. Not only do you have to constantly put more and more money into SEO just to keep your position, but you may not even be moving up the rankings relative to every other firm doing the exact same thing.

In this sense, SEO marketing becomes an endless loop of investing just to stay afloat—if you stop, you drop, and if you don’t, you’ll be paying for a marketing strategy that might not even be effective at bringing in more leads. After all, if you’re not already in the first 10 results of a Google search, your task is that much harder.

First-page listings (i.e., the first 10 or so results) take up almost 95% of click-through rates, with the second and third page fighting over the remaining 5%. Marketing teams focused solely on SEO will tell you that your listing will still get clicks regardless of position or that they can get you to the first page of Google. They’re lying (probably). Even if they could actually do that, you’ll be paying THOUSANDS each month to retain that position once you get there, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to stay.

That’s because if Google decides to change its algorithms at a moment’s notice (like they do often), you could lose everything you’ve invested.

Regardless of how good your firm’s SEO is, there’s also the issue of whether or not your SEO is actually drawing in customers. Even if you are on the first page, you’re not the only one there. Potential clients will quickly browse your site and often make a decision based on their first impression of your firm. They do the same for a couple of other results they reviewed and can make a decision within seconds.

More often than not, this decision is made almost entirely off cost, so the only way for you to compete with other firms is by being the cheapest in town. But instead of slashing your prices, you can give up the SEO rat race as a whole and bring in clients a better way.

The truth is that as long as people can find you when they need you, your SEO is good enough. If you can type your name or your firm’s name into Google and the appropriate links show up, you’ve done all you need to do.

Instead of trying to pull cold clients from search results, you should focus on reaching out to clients and building recognition, trust, and a relationship. This is something SEO can’t get you—no matter how good it is, it will never pop into a potential client’s inbox reminding them of your firm and how you help. SEO won’t appear on a social media feed with an informative blog addressing the questions that are keeping your audience up at night.

By creating content that helps your potential clients understand exactly what you can do for them and making them familiar with your brand, they’ll feel much more comfortable working with your firm, even if your price isn’t the lowest. Ditching SEO and focusing on content caters much more to the clients themselves, not the robots who decide your search ranking.

If you’re finally ready to break away from the endless cycle of SEO, Spotlight Branding can help. They’ll get you out of the SEO rut and into creating content that will actually drive clients to your firm.