Law Firm SEO - Search Engine Optimization

SEO for Law Firms and Lawyers

Are you getting new clients from your website?

Simply having a well designed website doesn’t guarantee new business will flow into your firm. To be an effective marketing tool, your website must rank high in the major search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

There are several strategies you can use to drive traffic to your site. One way is through Pay Per Click, or PPC, advertising. Basically, you would pay Google and the other search engines to have an ad for your services show up when consumers in your area search for a lawyer. You are only charged when someone “clicks” on your ad and visits your site. The charge is the same whether a visitor spends one second or 10 minutes looking at your site. Once the money you advanced for PPC advertising runs out, your ad disappears from the search engine until you’ve replenished your PPC funding.

Clearly, PPC advertising can get expensive and, in this economy, it is not always cost effective. Fortunately, there is another way you can make sure you’re getting the most from your website. It’s called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

Google, Bing and Yahoo each have their own set of rules, algorithms, regulations, etc., that they use to decide if a website should be indexed. These search engines also use “spiders” and “robots” to troll the internet for keywords. To make sure your Website ranks high on the major search engines, it has to be optimized for each of them.

The best SEO uses “White Hat” techniques to improve search engine rankings. White Hat SEO means that your site is structured for the search engines, reflects the major keywords your prospects are using, and is able to attract incoming links from other sites. It is also important that your site’s navigation system be easy to use while meeting the needs of your visitors. Most importantly, White Hat SEO focuses on your human audience and its needs.

Some SEO professionals use “Black Hat” techniques – such as keyword stuffing, invisible text and doorway pages - that focus only on search engines and not a human audience. Very often, Black Hat SEO does not obey search engines rules. While using these techniques might work in the short run, they are not a good idea if you see your website as a long-term investment and even run the risk of having your site banned from the search engines.

Effective White Hat SEO takes a lot of work, patience and time – time that you, as a business owner, probably don’t have. But fortunately, SEO doesn't have to cost thousands of dollars. Please speak with us about optimizing your website so that it provides the maximum marketing benefit to your firm.