While more and more legal professionals are getting a good handle on law firm internet marketing terminology, concepts, and strategies, there are still many more that are still trying to get a grasp on the basics. For example, there are many lawyers that don’t understand the differences between various parts of a search engine results page. Here’s a quick break down of the most relevant differences.
So where do you want your law firm website to appear? The answer is everywhere. While as many as 90% of all search clicks may go to natural or organic listings, there is still plenty of new visitor opportunity in the paid search or sponsored listings areas. Let’s face it, that’s a significant portion of Google’s revenue.
Attorneys using the internet to market their practices need to be aware of the content being publicized on their sites. There are many important ramifications of having original quality content on your website. These can range from ethical considerations, marketing effects, and search engine optimization aspects. While some lawyers provide their own site content, many more are turning to third-party content sources. A content production firm will produce new, fresh, and unique content for your website. However, if you decide hire a content production service, be sure you grow your relationship slowly.
Another aspect to hiring the right content provider is being sure they are experienced in SEO. “Writing-well” and “writing-well for the internet” are two different things. Some content providers don’t understand the nuances of content production in the context of SEO. Ideally, your SEO firm handles your site’s content production. That way, you can be sure that your content is written with search engine optimization in mind.
One of the core search engine optimization components that your content provider should understand is keyword density. Keyword density represents how many times your targeted keywords are used on a page. If this number is too low, you may not get the full benefit of the SEO for that term on the page. On the other hand, if the density is too high, also known as stuffing, search engines like google may actually penalize the page or your entire site.
Since your content provider should be writing content optimized for your keywords, you need to supply the provider with the keywords that you’d like targeted. This is another example of why having your SEO and content provided by the same firm is economical. Your SEO should be handling keyword discovery for your firm. Since they know your core keywords best, they will be able to provide content that is optimized for all keyword segments. In any case, it is important that your content provider is familiar with your keyword goals so that they are able to appropriately leverage those keywords in the site content.
In addition to keyword density, your content provider should also be familiar with keyword placement. Keyword placement deals with where keywords are placed on your web page. As a guideline, keywords need to be placed higher on your page. Some other good places for keywords are titles, headers, anchor text, and bold and emphasized text areas.
There are many considerations to be made when hiring a company to produce SEO content for your website. Overall, the most important factors are unique content that is written with search engine optimization in mind. Getting good content is one of the best ways to help your website get found and generate new clients for your law firm.
If you’re law firm SEO efforts have managed to get your firm’s site to the top of the search engine results for the key phrases you’ve targeted, congratulations.
One great way to increase your firm’s web presence, is to start creating websites that are specific to the various types of law that you practice.
This law firm SEO technique, known as “micro-siteing”, involves building several more specific websites that help promote your firm.
If done correctly, this technique is an excellent way to enhance your law firm’s online footprint in the search engines.
The practice-specific sites you create may be very different from your main site and very different from each other. In fact, if the content is even similar, Google, Yahoo and Bing will discount the value of the these practice-specific sites as duplicates.
In addition to being careful of duplication, it is essential that the sites are robust. Don’t just put a page or two on a topic and expect your visitors to engage your site. For example, if you are building a bankruptcy site, think of what you would want your visitors to know about bankruptcy as if this were your firm’s only site.
Once implemented, you now have more than one site at work for your law firm. This is analogous to having multiple ads in other media. Different color, design, and content will appeal different visitors. You will be able to capture a bigger portion of the targeted search market.
While this gives you a basic overview of the strategy, you might have many more questions about building a practice specific site. For example, you might be wondering why you can’t just add the new content to your existing site? Or whether this is considered a bad practice by the search engines?
