When I went to law school, there was very little instruction in marketing, let alone search engine marketing. Which is very unfortunate, considering the impact search engine marketing has had on the legal profession, especially in recent years. This lack of understanding has led many legal professionals to employ SEO techniques that are, well, let’s call them, less than professional.
So what is good and what is not good in terms of SEO for law firms? This question is open to much debate. If this is your first time diving into search marketing, I highly recommend checking out Google’s webmaster guidelines and reading the beginner’s guide on the subject. I would also recommend it to SEOmoz and SEObook (although you do mind finding the information there a little over your head).
Before we get into what’s right and what’s not right, let’s do a quick and simplified summary of search engines and search engine marketing. First of all, it’s important to understand that most search engine results pages (the pages that appear after you perform a search) contain two main areas, paid listings and organic listings. It’s true that most search engines are adding new areas of functionality, but understanding the simple payment vs. organic distinction is a good place to start.
Paid listings are pretty easy to understand. You pay the search engine to include an advertisement for your company, in our law firm, on the search engine results page. These listings must include a “sponsored listing” tag and usually have a different background color to distinguish them from organic listings. Interestingly, many search engine users don’t even know the difference between paid and organic listings (an issue that the FTC needs to investigate further). On Google, these ads usually appear in the first three places on the results page and in the column to the right.
Organic results, on the other hand, cannot be achieved by paying the search engine. They are generated by Google’s proprietary algorithm. In other words, Google’s software organizes these results and decides what to display based on the phrase the user entered into the search query box. It has been said that complex search engines can use more than two hundred signals to determine which web pages are served for a particular search.
Search engine optimization includes all the methods and techniques that someone can use to “influence” their organic listings in search results. You may see the words “rankings” and “positions” used to describe organic listings. However, it’s worth noting that rankings alone shouldn’t be the main focus of your law firm’s SEO campaign.
Now that we’ve established a basic foundation, let’s discuss how to get search engine optimization right for your law firm.
In my opinion, the best place to start your law firm’s SEO campaign is with a blog. There are many definitions and concepts of what a blog entails, but for the purposes of this article, we will think of a blog as a website that allows an author to quickly, easily, and frequently add new pages and posts in an organized manner. Search engines love blogs, especially those built on the WordPress platform. There is a lot of information available on legal blogs. If you’re looking for a good resource, check out Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs.
If you’re looking for an expensive way to get started with blogging, all you need to do is register a domain, set up a hosting account (I recommend Hostgator, but Godaddy will), and install WordPress (which both HostGator and GoDaddy make exceptionally easy to use). do).
You need to think hard about your legal blog in terms of the issue you will be right about and the voice your blog will take. You should also take a quick minute to review your state’s professional liability rules to add any advertising liability disclaimers that may or may not apply to blogging depending on who you ask.
Once you’re up and running with WordPress, and assuming you’ve changed your privacy settings to allow search engines to crawl your blog, you’ve already started your SEO campaign on the right foot. I also suggest you go to wordpress.org and do some reading on permalinks and look up some WordPress SEO plugins (I recommend the one from yoast). You should also consider including some contact information and a contact form to allow visitors to contact you.
Now is the time to write your first post. But before you write, you’ll want to do your research. Sourcing your blog posts is often the difference between a successful blog and a failed blog. Be sure to include citations or links to your sources.
The quality of your blog posts and other content on your blog or legal website will be the main factor in your ability to succeed with online marketing. I have always reduced all of SEO to one simple concept:
“Develop great search-aware content into an organized site architecture and get it in front of those who are ready, willing and able to link to and advertise it further.”
If you use WordPress, it will take care of most of the site architecture issues you might face. If you’re careful to use keywords in your titles and throughout your posts, you’ll do most of what needs to be done to make your content “search-aware.” If you publish your content through social media and other online channels to the right audience, you will attract links and more advertising.
It is these links and advertising that will provide the main signals to the search engines that will influence the position of your web pages in the organic listings.
The two most important things to remember for SEO specifically for your law firm are professionalism and patience.
Don’t post anything you’re not proud to link to your reputation. Have patience. Search marketing does not produce great results overnight. However, if you stick to the basic plan of developing great content and getting in front of an audience that can link to it and further advertise it, you’ll start to see increases in traffic to your website, your search rankings, and eventually new customers for you. your company.