May 24, 2011
Law Firm Marketing & SEO
Given the increasingly competitive legal services market, law firms and lawyers often find themselves in need of more effective legal marketing. While there are many potential methods of law firm marketing: social media (e.g. Facebook), pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), TV, Radio, in this post we’ll examine how SEO can be effective for law firm marketing.
Organic SEO
When people speak of SEO they most often mean organic SEO, i.e. manipulating search engine results to cause a website to display higher on a search engine results page (SERP). Unlike PPC advertising, e.g. Google AdWords, organic SEO does not require site owners to pay every time someone clicks on a link to their site(s). Many people contend, and we somewhat agree, that web users have become so savvy as to unconsciously devalue PPC listings and skip right to the organic listings, even though the PPC listings actually display above the organic listings. Further, we have often observed that conversion rates are generally higher for users that visit a site via organic listings as opposed to PPC listings. However, because search engines don’t disclose how their algorithms work in detail, organic SEO cannot provide very targeted advertising as easily as pay per click advertising. As such, PPC still occupies a very valuable place within most law firm marketing plans.
Search Engine Ranking Factors
In order to effectuate organic SEO, a through understanding of the factors that search engines use to determine the order in which results should be displayed in their SERPs is necessary. Although search engines, e.g. Google, are very cryptic about those factors they use, Google claims to use more than 200, an examination of their patents along with their public statements can be very useful.
Though we won’t discuss each of the factors that we think Google uses, we will discuss two very important factors, in our experience: PageRank & link position.
1) PageRank (Link Juice)
Prior to Google, site on the internet were manually organized by humans into directories. However, this method was neither objective nor efficient. As such, Larry Page and Sergey Brin proposed a new method; rather, than having a small group of people determining the value and relevance of a site, why not let everyone with a website help make those determinations?
PageRank did just that (Google: please pardon me for oversimplifying) it counted the total number of links on the internet and interpreted them as votes, the more links a site had to it the more likely it was to be a quality site and they higher it would display in Google’s SERPs.
And while PageRank by itself worked to provide high quality and relevant SERPs for a period of time, people soon learned how to game the system. As such, Google added more factors into its algorithm.
2) Link Position
The first published iteration of PageRank did not allocate value to a particular link based upon the link’s location on a page, e.g. top or bottom or left or right, but subsequent versions of Google’s algorithm have done so. In general, Google allocates more weight to links that appear at the top of a page than it does to those that are at the bottom. Moreover, Google also allocates more weight to those think s that occur in the main content of a page as opposed to those on the side.
If you are interested in hiring us to help with your law firm marketing and SEO, please contact us vis the form on this page of call us at (480) 359-4059.
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