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Archive for the ‘Legal SEO’ Category
Thursday, January 19th, 2012
While many website owners are fully aware of the importance of building an attractive website which will attract the highest level of traffic, not all of them understand how to incorporate SEO techniques into that design. Further, few site owners have a good understanding of the fact that any website which is heavily sprinkled with graphics, frames, Flash or any other codes which are not specifically based on HTML will require specific SEO techniques in order to be properly indexed by Google and other major search engines.
It’s much easier to actually design your site with SEO in mind than to have to come back and completely rework it later. Consider the following when you are designing your site and you when you are done you will have not only a well-designed website, but one that is full of search engine optimization which will push your site up the rankings quickly, bringing plenty of targeted traffic.
- When you are just getting started, remember that your URL or domain name can be a primary factor in how your site will be positioned down the road in the search engines and directories. Research your URL before deciding on one, and if you can, get some professional help. Your URL will stay with you for a long time to come, so make sure it helps your site rather than harms it. A captivating URL which allows your visitors to totally understand the content of your website simply by looking at it will allow you a much more prominent web presence.
- Ensure the search spiders will have lots of basic links to follow in order to index your homepage text, then include internal links to other site pages. Make it easier for spiders to actually find your pages by including a site map which categorizes all the pages on your site. Include one or more links to the site map from your home page. Make sure you have included strategic keywords in all the link texts.
- Create catchy, interesting, exciting headlines. Your headline section is crucial for SEO, and you should include your most relevant keywords so your users will have a clear understanding of the content on your page. Use targeted keywords when writing your H1 tag, using the most relevant keywords within the first 60-70 characters.
- Make sure your content is easy to read, understandable, and makes your readers want to finish the article. Your objective is eventual conversion therefore the more informative your website is, the better, however you have to use accessible language which is easily understood by all. Web page copy is often overlooked in its importance for SEO, so try to remember that search robots require text and HTML tags in order to successfully index your site. Further, directory editors will make the determination to list your site or not based on its relevancy and uniqueness. Text above the fold is the most important to search engine spiders as are keywords at the beginnings of your paragraphs and in as many paragraph headings as possible.
- Although there is much less dependence on meta tags now than in the past, it still doesn’t hurt to provide title, heading, description, keywords and alternate tags in the header section of your pages which are to be indexed. The description tag is especially important because it is used by search engines as a means of describing your site. Make it particularly compelling, using strategic keywords. Your title tag should be from 5-10 words, and keyword rich while also being highly relevant to your page.
While web design is certainly important, you can have the most fabulous, well-laid out site on the Internet, but if you haven’t implemented basic SEO practices, nobody will ever see it. Use SEO tactics from the very beginning, and you will have a payoff in traffic and rankings.
Tags: website design for lawyers
Posted in Legal SEO | Comments Off on Designing the Very Best SEO Website
Thursday, January 12th, 2012
While you can hire a company who will take care of the SEO for your website—and will likely conduct an initial SEO audit, in truth you can do this type of audit yourself. An SEO audit is meant to provide a snapshot of sorts of the health of your website as well as identifying any potential problems with the search engine optimization of your site. Proper SEO can not only bring in the most highly targeted traffic for your website, but can also move you up the search engine’s ranking systems.
- First, define your statement of purpose—or explain why you have a website in the first place. This doesn’t mean you should write a three page report of why you have a website—or that you should write down “money, visibility and brand building,” and be done with it. The point is to figure out what you hope to accomplish with your website as far as your business is concerned. Is your primary goal to educate people through your content, or are you selling a service, such as legal services or solar installation services? Are you specifically selling a product? How do you want to go about doing that? As you answer these questions, what follows will make more sense.
- What are your current keywords and keyword phrases? Did you follow a specific method in determining the most successful keywords for your particular niche, or simply use the most obvious or most common keywords? Write down your keywords, then justify that keyword in one sentence. What are your search priorities, and how well do you truly know your readers, customers or clients? Do you actually know what people are looking for when they type your specific keywords into their search bar? Step away from your product or service and ask yourself what you would type in if you were looking for your business. Great keywords are the backbone of a successful website, and you can’t simply jot down a few off the top of your head and hope for the best.
- Review your current tools and practices. If you are using Google Analytics, look at your data and reports, beyond just looking to see how many people clicked onto your site. What is actually more important than that number is how many of those people immediately clicked away, or spent less than thirty seconds on your site. If this is the case in a large number of visitors, then your keywords are absolutely not doing the job they were designed to do and must be changed. People who are clicking off your site immediately are doing so because one glance tells them this is not what they were looking for.
- Analyze your website’s design and architecture. Check out your URL keywords, the age of your content, how often new content is added, deleted or modified, how unique and interesting the content is, and how visually appealing the overall site is. The organization of your website is crucial, in that people must be able to easily find exactly what they are looking for. Your internal linking structure is of great importance as well, so make sure any time a user clicks on an internal link that it takes them immediately to what they are searching for. Make sure your pages don’t look cluttered or chaotic, and don’t overuse images or flashy fonts.
- Go over your content carefully, ensuring it is fully optimized and keyword rich. There should be no unnatural usage of keywords, rather they must appear natural throughout the content, with the greatest concentration being above the fold as well as in the main header and paragraph titles. Is the content clear, or does it ramble? Does it grab the reader’s attention and hold onto it until the very end? Does it properly relate to the business purpose of the website?
- Review your backlinks, and ensure none of them are broken or past their prime. Only the highest quality links will garner you Google’s nod of approval, so ditch any that are not giving your site a boost.
Once you’ve been over yours site with a fine-tooth comb, make note of any areas you found to be lacking, then create an action plan in which you will fix those issues. An SEO audit of your website can be an essential part of your overall plan, and the results can make the difference in whether your site—therefore your business—grows in popularity or simply sits there.
Tags: Lawyer Website Design
Posted in Law Firm SEO, Legal SEO | Comments Off on Conducting an SEO Audit for Your Website
Saturday, October 1st, 2011
Search engine penalties can be bad news for your legal website sending it plummeting down the list into no-man’s land—or worse, being removed entirely. It’s imperative that you check your law firm’s website frequently in order to ensure you are not violating any search engine rules. All the major search engines have their own list of “do’s and don’ts” which tend to change fairly rapidly in an effort to stop black hat SEO and other unethical practices. If your legal website has inadvertently violated one of these rules, don’t despair, as it is possible to dig yourself out from under these penalties–so long as you take immediate action.
What Causes Search Engine Penalties?
The majority of the causes of penalties by search engines are not ones you will ever have to deal with, as they are deliberate efforts to hustle and con the search engine. Code swapping, also known as cloaking occurs when one thing is submitted to a search engine, then when the user clicks they see something entirely different. This can occasionally be done legitimately in order to prevent others from imitating a successful page of to hide a text-only page for a more visually appealing one. Either way, it will get you a slap on the wrist from your search engine, so it’s important to delete this practice from your legal SEO arsenal.
Keyword and Meta Tag Stuffing
More commonly, websites will be penalized for repeating a word or phrase over and over in an attempt to increase relevancy and move up the search engine ladder. Remember to use keywords judiciously in your legal website and legal blog, and if you manage your own meta tags, never place your high traffic legal keywords in meta tags when they have no relation to the actual web page. Check your content and your meta tags thoroughly to make sure your keywords are used in a natural and acceptable manner in order to avoid penalties. Remember that a normal occurrence of keywords in high quality copy writing will be between 2% and 5%. If you repeat your legal keywords to the extent that they make up more than 10% of the words on your page, expect a negative consequence.
Call (769) 218-6099 for a free discussion about your law firm website.
Penalties for Other Practices
Tiny text, page stuffing or duplicate pages and page spoofing are usually done deliberately, rarely accidentally. Those who are attempting to “game” the system will hide keywords by putting them in at a 1pt font—beware, search engines are getting more and more sophisticated and able to spot such techniques. Page spoofing occurs when a page seems to be legitimately developed for a particular keyword, then when the user clicks on it, they are taken to a page with little relation to the original click.
Page stuffing occurs when the same web page is either directly duplicated, or modified only slightly, then submitted to the search engine. If your law firm has multiple legal websites as well as one or more legal blogs, make sure you take extra care not to duplicate content from one to another. This is also known as “mirroring” a site, meaning you have several domains and put the exact same content on each. Whatever the reason, it is considered spamming and can get you penalized.
If your Legal Pages Have Been Penalized
If your legal websites or blogs have been removed for what the search engine considers an infraction, you have two choices. You can get a new domain name and, essentially, begin from scratch, making sure you don’t employ the same tactics which garnered your original penalty. If you had a well-established legal site, however, this is somewhat akin to business suicide. You have likely built your brand name and spent extensive time and money marketing your legal website.
A better idea is to first find out what earned you the search engine’s wrath by contacting the individual help and support branch for each search engine. Once you know what went wrong, then the offending practices or page must be immediately removed. If you have linked to bad sites, get rid of the links. If you have hidden text, remove it, if you have engaged in keyword stuffing, have your content rewritten. You may be required to contact the search engine, admit your mistake, tell them how you have corrected it and beg forgiveness—in other words, fall on your sword. After that, the only thing you can do is wait—it can take as little as a month, or as much as a year for full absolution to occur and the search engine to allow you back into the fold.
Tags: law firm website, Law Firm Website advertising, law firm website marketing, law firm website seo
Posted in Legal SEO | Comments Off on Monitoring Your Law Firm Website to Avoid Search Engine Penalties
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
Having a great legal website design and fabulous legal SEO can allow your law firm to become much more focused—and the more focused your firm becomes, the more quickly they will be recognized as a specific niche area expert. Once that happens, you will find that other attorneys will begin referring cases to you which are applicable to your specialty, and soon you will find that while other attorneys may be forced to take any case which walks in the door, you will be attracting your ideal client. While television ads go out to all those watching television, the Internet can be a much more specific magnet which attracts only those clients who are looking for a specific attorney to deal with their specific problem. It is this specificity which makes online marketing essential for legal firms, and gives law office websites tremendous marketing power.
Free Advice concerning Legal SEO and online marketing. Speak with an expert not a sales representative and get REAL ANSWERS to your questions. Call (769) 218-6099 for free tips and ideas on online marketing for law firms.
You may have seen solo practitioners who list every known practice area on their website—a strategy which is almost guaranteed to be unsuccessful. This is typically known as the “shotgun” approach, and while the jack of all trades attorney may feel he is attracting more clients by specializing in everything but the kitchen sink, the reality is that potential clients may feel there is no focus to the practice, and quickly click to an attorney website which does offer focus. The second reason these types of attorney websites are often unsuccessful is due to the fact that there is not enough information on any one subject, meaning nothing shows up in the search engines.
The Ideal Client
The ultimate goal of your online marketing strategy is to attract your ideal client, not just any client. If your staff is constantly answering phone calls from clients who either do not have particularly attractive cases or cannot afford your services, then your online advertising budget is being wasted. Internet marketing can give you the capability to specifically focus with precision and accuracy—if you use it wisely. Your ideal client is interested in seeing a focused attorney who successfully represents clients with the same specific problem they are currently experiencing.
The potential client who turns to the Internet to research attorneys can now put in very precise search terms to find the most experienced attorney in a particular practice area. Your ideal client has likely screened several attorneys from the comfort of their home before they ever pick up the phone to make an actual call. Should your client want to pursue a personal injury claim following a bus accident, they will likely type in “Bus Accident Attorney in Albuquerque,” to find a local attorney devoted to their issue. By the same token, the client who has recently been charged with a DUI or DWI is looking for an attorney who focuses exclusively on drunk driving defenses; if the client’s case involves a breath test reading then he or she will want an attorney who has demonstrated the best strategy and has the most experience in fighting the Breathalyzer used in their jurisdiction. It is also much more likely that the client who is putting in such specific search terms are also willing—and able—to pay for your services.
Marketing Your Legal Firm from an SEO Perspective
Search engines are uniquely designed to find a particular page on a website which most thoroughly answers the consumer’s questions. Therefore, the more helpful—not to mention detailed—your firm’s website is, the more likely you will other sites linking to your pages, and the greater chance you stand of being known as an authority on a specific topic. The more websites which link to your pages, the more likely your pages will show up in the search engines. If you want to optimize your law firm’s website, you must have a great amount of unique content on one specific practice area as well as more interior pages which deal with the many issues related to that practice area.
Of course you need to make sure you have a well-designed website with an easy-to-use navigation system, as well as a content management system which allows your attorneys to visit the site frequently, adding and editing content as necessary. The quality of your online content is extremely important, as are the links to other interior pages on the website relating to a particular issue. Your local telephone number and address need to be easy to find, and, ideally, on every page of your site. More and more important are the number of links from social media websites, as well as the outbound links to other websites which deal with the specific issue. In any case, tailoring your website for your ideal client, while being extremely aware of SEO, can make the difference between run-of-the mill clients vs. your ideal client.
Free Advice concerning Legal SEO and online marketing. Call (769) 218-6099 for free advice and tips. Speak with an expert not a sales representative and get REAL ANSWERS to your questions.
Tags: Legal SEO, legal website, Online Marketing For Legal Website
Posted in Lawyer Website Design, Legal SEO | Comments Off on The Importance of Online Marketing for Your Legal Website
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
As you are probably already aware, law firm marketing has made a concerted shift toward online avenues in the past few years, the result being that the cost of online advertising has skyrocketed. The simple rules of supply and demand, plus the greatly increased cost have pushed many smaller law firms completely out of the market, while the larger law firms may be vastly overpaying for their own online marketing. Considering that some law firms who were spending as much as $5 per click for Pay-Per-Click ads just to claw their way to the top spot on Google, are now paying an astonishing $15 (and more) per click. If you do the math, and figure that the average online conversion rate is a paltry 1-2%, and that a firm such as the one described above could conceivably receive anywhere from 300-1000 clicks per day ($4,500 per day, $135,000 per month) then you get a good idea of the enormous amounts of money currently being spent on legal online advertising. The same law firms which are spending these big bucks for PPC ads, are likely also paying large amounts to advertise in legal online directories, which have been found to be semi-effective at best.
Set Yourself Apart From the Crowd with Great Legal SEO
So, what’s a legal firm to do, you may ask? If dedicating massive amounts of financial resources to get your firm noticed online is not the way to go, then just what should you be doing? The ultimate goal–and one you should never, ever forget when designing your online presence–is to set yourself apart from the crowd. Get yourself noticed, not because you spent the most money for online advertising, but because you are an amazing, cutting edge law firm who rightfully should be noticed. In order to be noticed for all the right reasons, your first line of business should probably be to completely re-evaluate your marketing campaign, putting many more eggs in your social media marketing and SEO baskets than before. Once you are firmly established as a legal firm who generates useful, high quality content for its potential clients, posting it on a blog and sharing with the social world gives you a personal connection to your visitors, inspiring them to contact your firm rather than your competitor’s when they need help. In order to ensure you get the very most from your online marketing campaign, you must, of course, utilize SEO in every conceivable way. Proper SEO will get your legal website, articles, blog, right up to the top of the search engines, increasing visibility and exposure, thus conversion and, finally, revenue.
The Cost of Social Media and Law Firm SEO
If you haven’t already figured it out, the cost of social media marketing and search engine optimization are a mere fraction of what Pay-Per-Click, television commercials, online legal directories or print ads will cost you. As a large law firm you could easily be paying $100,000 per month on this type of conventional advertising, while a social media and law firm SEO retainer can cost you from ten to fifteen thousand per month—and achieve exactly the same results. Once your website and online content has built up its rankings, the marketing budget can be cut even further.
Does Social Media Marketing Really Work?
If you are skeptical about the power of social media marketing, remember that social media gives us the opportunity to be a part of a community which allows us, if we listen closely, to learn things regarding our market we may not already know. In the quest to establish your authority and promote your legal brand, you can make valuable contributions to the social conversations, quickly becoming recognized as an authority on your particular specialization. When you are seen in many places on the internet, there is a greater likelihood people will follow links back to your website where they can learn more about your particular expertise.
Social media has completely changed the legal marketing game, making your law firm more accessible to your clients and potential clients as well as allowing you to successfully engage the community regarding particular areas of law. Remember that even though your time is limited by your caseload, social media gives you the kind of virtual presence that is literally 24/7. Many law firms hesitate to jump into the social media waters due to privacy concerns, however you should carefully balance these concerns with the incredible benefits you can reap from an active social media online presence.
FREE ADVICE – Call (769) 218-6099 to speak to experienced law firm SEO and Social media expert marketers, not sales people. Call today!
Tags: law firm seo, Legal SEO, social media marketing
Posted in Law Firm SEO, Legal SEO | Comments Off on SEO and Social Media Marketing – What Your Law Firm Needs to Know
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