As participants in one of the most competitive industries in the nation, lawyers must be much more creative in their use of search engine optimization. Normal SEO tactics will not work as most of the relevant search terms have been saturated with advertisements. But because most lawyers specialize, the search terms that are relevant to them are limited in scope.
Great law firm SEO often consists of techniques that are less known yet equally efficient, such as the following:
1. Becoming A Known Expert Online.
Through tools of connection such as law message boards and forums, many lawyers are creating a reputation for themselves online in their off hours. By participating in populated forums, a lawyer is able to showcase his or her legal skill and expertise naturally without having to hard sell any service at all. As it turns out, people are quite open to receiving free information and legal advice online and they reward this by referrals and positive comments. These comments can be turned into testimonials, high quality links as well as direct sources for referral, thus building upon your law firm SEO.
2. Link Building & Reputation Management Campaigns
Outside of dominating a particular keyword on a major search engine, which takes tens of thousands of dollars, the most effective method to draw the attention of human visitors and search engines is to build quality one-way links with reputable sites. Sites that end with the suffix .gov and .edu are highly desirable as the search engines consider them to be the trustworthiest; however, .com and .net sites can also help a ranking.
Quality is more important than quantity in the modern online landscape. A website can actually be penalized for linking to low quality sites, which then negatively affects your law firm SEO. This is where reputation management comes into play. One of the most underused methods of reputation management is actually administered by Google. Google Disavow is a Webmaster program that allows a Webmaster to disconnect a site from low quality links, thereby increasing the likelihood of higher search engine rankings.
3. Blogging
Blogging gives free law firm SEO without having to rely on the behavior of others. By creating an effective law blog, many attorneys have been able to pull in new customers, while at the same time naturally helping their law firm SEO ranking. Blogs allow lawyers to connect themselves to precise keywords and build links without waiting on other webmasters to “decide” to include them there.
As lawyers, you should not worry about cannibalizing yourselves by giving away free information on blogs. Most people do not have the time to actually implement the information they find; they simply want to know that they are dealing with an expert before trusting that attorney.
