Unlike many other law firms, personal injury practices get the internet. They understand their market well and know that, as with almost all other business sectors, upwards of 20% and rising of instructions now derive from online searches.

There are 2 ways to succeed in getting on page 1 of google for the hundreds of volume UK personal injury searches each month. The first is pay per click. Of course, whoever pays the most per click will appear at the top of google’s searches, but did you know that for many high volume personal injury searches, each click can cost as much as £30.00 ?! Some of the bigger personal injury practices are spending literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands on pay per click and they wouldn’t be doing so if they weren’t getting a return on that investment.

The second method is search engine optimisation (seo) to appear high in the organic listings, which are not paid for. Again, personal injury firms know the value of this traffic and pay big money to seo companies. But things are changing and have massively changed in the last month. Google has clamped down on “over optimisation” and link buying in an unprecedented way. Buying inbound links from other websites to your own has been the number 1 factor for getting onto page 1 of google organically for years. But no more. Not only no more but google, out of the blue, and perhaps unfairly, has actually penalised sites for link buying in a big way,. with many losing 20-50 places in the rankings.

This is a risky ploy by google – it is hurting some of the very same personal injury practices that pay it big money in pay per click. For whatever reason, and many say the whole idea is to drive more people to pay per click and raise the costs even more, there is a window of opportunity for those with a smaller budget and a clean backlink profile, to reap the benefits of this upheaval.

One firm which tells us that their rankings have improved significantly in the last week is Waring & Co. The firm has 2 websites, a main site and also http://www.personal-injury-claims.co.uk. Whilst it’s only 1 search term among many, google “personal injury”. You’ll see both sites are in the top 20.

Interesting times in personal injury online marketing …