You’ve heard search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical feature of your law firm website, but do you actually understand what the heck that means? This is the first installment in a series of five posts that will explain everything you need to know about SEO.
At a high level, SEO simply means doing things that will help your website rank higher in the organic search results for the topics you want associated with your firm.
SEO can be part of a comprehensive marketing plan, but it is not—nor should it ever be—the sole plan. Search engines don't care about your business; they care about theirs. What you want is a branding, marketing, client acquisition, and client retention plan to build a bulletproof business. SEO may be part of this.
Develop a Plan of Action for Your Firm
As you read about SEO, keep the following questions in mind:
- Does SEO fit into the overall marketing plan for my firm? If so, how?
- What topics should I focus on?
- What things need to be done to rank highly?
- Will ranking highly for my chosen topics actually lead to more business?
- Is SEO the most cost-effective path toward my goals right now?
Do You Need SEO?
Before we get into unraveling the technical mysteries of how search engines rank a website, it's worth figuring out whether this even matters for your firm. If your practice is referral-based, building business through networking, reputation, word of mouth, and long-term clients, maybe all you need is name recognition so that those referrals and current clients can find you. For name-based searches, good results happen almost automatically because there is relatively little competition in the search world for your name (unless it is shared with a celebrity or a lot of other lawyers in your town). Your marketing energies are probably better spent networking with referral sources and staying in touch with your current clients.
On the other hand, if your practice relies on advertising, SEO can be another form of advertising for you. This means that in addition to name recognition, you probably want practice area keywords (e.g., divorce attorney, bankruptcy lawyer, probate attorney) in your targeted geographic area associated with your website. You might even want to show up if someone is just researching your area of the law (e.g., filing for divorce in Michigan, How long does bankruptcy take?). The trouble is, on these broad searches, you're now competing with other attorneys in your market. So you will have to figure out how to get search engines to show you above your competition. Not only that, but the search engines change the rules (their algorithms) on an almost weekly basis. Sounds like fun, right?
The broad distinction here is between searches that have little competition and those that have a lot. If you're in a small town or if you're the only person in your city that does a particular service, you'll find that high rankings come easily. It is a tactic of unscrupulous SEO and marketing companies to prey on these firms and sell them on "guaranteed page-one rankings" for something such as "Stanton Michigan Personal Injury Attorney" or "Ann Arbor Michigan fast food restaurant franchise attorney." Stanton has a population of 1,400 people, and Ann Arbor is so specific that neither search has much competition, so there is no need to pay big money for SEO in those situations.
Getting a Page-One Ranking
Once you’ve decided that you need SEO, there are three ways to increase your ranking in search engines:
- Convince the search engine that you are an authority on the topic being researched.
- Convince the search engine that you are the go-to business for the service being searched.
- Pay search engines for advertising space.
Up Next
In the next installment, we will begin to review the first of those three ways to rank highly in search engines: becoming an authority.