Over at Legal Practice Pro, Jay Fleischman explained that creating legal marketing content for your website and other marketing venues takes time to pay off. Fleischman advocates a long-term approach to content creation and explains that you’ve got to keep at it every day.

While the Fleischman article is terrific and makes some great points, it doesn’t really provide an answer to the issue raised. How long does it take for your online legal marketing efforts to pay off?

I recently had the opportunity to do a test that provides some insight that helps answer the question.

My firm was hired to create a website for a family law practice. The firm had an existing site that had been around for years. The site was generating about 25 visitors per day. The site content was thin—seriously thin. It had nothing much other than a description of the firm, attorney biographies, and brief descriptions of the services provided.

We worked with the firm to create a content-rich site with more than 200 single-spaced pages of content about family law. It’s good stuff.

The site launched on January 11.

For two years, the site averaged 175 visitors per week.

We launched the new site without any fanfare or announcement. The first week (actually four days of the week), we jumped to nearly 500 visitors. The next week, we dropped to 300 visitors, but we have steadily climbed for each of the past 7 weeks to about 700 visitors per week. We’ve quadrupled the traffic in 7 weeks. That’s organic traffic without help from advertising, press releases, or anything else. We’re moving up in the search engines on some primary keywords and on tons of secondary keywords. All we did is put up the content—period.

Is the firm seeing increased calls? Of course.

How long does it take your online legal marketing efforts to pay off? It’s quick, very quick. Content works.