SEO Will Make You Better Than Half Online
By Bob Weiss
January 2010
Our new national marketing effectiveness survey indicates 48 percent of business and commercial litigation firms now use formal search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to get their Web sites ranked as high as possible on the first page of Google and the other major search engines—and that 23 percent are getting desirable cases from these efforts. Effective online marketing is a big project and the options go far beyond the scope of this article, however, the following is a decent start.
Today, a law firm Web site should be designed and function as more than just an online brochure. If you are set-up as an online brochure - and you’d like to improve your site’s marketing value and search rankings - here are the basic actions to take.
A hot-linked email address and direct dial phone number should appear at the top of all attorneys’ biographies. The most common reason visitors come to your site is to obtain contact information. (This is also why yellow and white pages use and value have plummeted.)
Relevance to search terms employed and the age - more recent is better - of postings are major reasons for one site appearing above another as a search result. Regularly update biographies, representative cases and transactions, firm and practice group descriptions. Add all articles written and any press releases available about the firm and lawyers to the site, as well.
Even better, create a blog, and contribute short posts about the law and your work to it regularly. Blog posts often appear first in search results. In certain areas of practice, a firm can be atop the rankings in Google in a matter of hours after creating a blog, literally.
Many consumer-direct law firms—PI, family and bankruptcy— have effectively employed basic technical SEO for years. Get someone who understands your practice to do it for your firm’s site. Basic strategy involves use of title, meta and heading tags. The search engines still look at both title and heading tags closely to get a good idea of what your site is about. Every page on your site should have proper tags. Proper means the tags are keyword targeted. And, the tags should be created to look natural to both search engines and humans so as not to get your site penalized—that means formally barred from rankings-- for “spammy” practices.
You probably don’t understand much of that last paragraph. That’s why you need outside help.
Keyword targeting is the process of finding which phrases are used and will be most effective at bringing up your web site's content on search engines. As a general rule, a shorter set of keywords is very broad and very competitive, e.g. "toys" will bring up 500+ million results on Google, and many people in the toy business target this keyword by default. But a longer, more specific set of keywords, say, "inexpensive kid toys in Denver", is less competitive and easier to successfully optimize for. Also, retailers have learned that shorter keyword searchers are “shoppers” and longer keyword searches are “buyers”.
If your firm employs these basics, our surveys show your site will outperform more than half of the competition. And, it’s all measurable (and the topic of my next column.)
ALYN-WEISS & ASSOCIATES, INC.
Marketing | Business Development
1331 - 17th Street, Suite 410
Denver, CO 80202
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-Jack Hanley, Reilly Pozner and Connelly, LLP
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