The Truth About Lawyer Internet Marketing

By the time you read this you may have read the books, blogs, or listened to someone you trust explain how to get your site content “optimized”. You researched your search terms (“long tail”, “short tail”, “no tail”)You update your site more than your competition (you hope). You know about all of the acronyms; “URL”, “SEO”, “SEM”, “PPC”, “SERP”, “CPC”, “CTR”, “ROI”, “CPA”, etc.

Now what?

Just wait?

No.

If you haven’t done so already, you need to get the highest quantity and quality of links to your site. How many? How high of quality?

How long is a string?(It’s all relative)

If you have a better website than your competitors, and better and/or higher quality links to a website that is more consistently updated than your competitors, you may beat them to the top of Google.

Could I BE more ambiguous? Short of stealing the “secret sauce” from Google, this is about as specific as it gets.

Back to links:

How do you get links?

1. Internal links
   • Link content within your site to other pages within your site-in ways that make sense.
   • Example: Link the words “divorce lawyer” to the page on your site that is about “divorce lawyer”, link the word “links” too your page about links.
   • Level of difficulty-low
   • Time consuming? Yes, but still easy
   • Beneficial? Yes
2. Link your site to other sites. This is very easy-and easy usually means you will not get much SEO value from it. However, more Internet users may appreciate useful and relevant links and come back to your site after realizing you give them valuable information.
   • Level of difficulty-very easy.
   • Beneficial-possibly a little.
3. Reciprocal links:
   Linking to someone else’s site in exchange for their site linking to yours.
   • For a while this was the “game” everyone played.
   • This is still a good way to get links to and from relevant sites.
   • Get links from the highest ranked most relevant sites you can:
   • The bar, other attorneys you would like to recommend, and who would like to recommend you.
   • Level of difficulty-medium to hard
   • Beneficial? A little bit.
   • Biggest problem with this type of linking-lots of time to get lots of them with minimal value.
4. “Narcissistic” links, or one-way links: links that are all to, for and “about” you.
   • Links from legal sites-but you don’t link to them
   • Links from blogs
   • May be easy to get from your own blogs or friends
   • Very time consuming
   • High time to link ratio
   • Can be a very high quality link.
5. Links from press releases about you or your area of law
   • Not too hard to get
   • Take time
   • Take money
   • Need to be done right to achieve value
   • If they are not done right they could be a waste of time and/or money
6. Links from non-news articles about you and/or your area of law
7. Links from forums
   Examples: Lawyers.com blogs and forums
8. Links from directories
9. Social Networking
   Setting up profiles about you and/or your firm can be a great way to improve your web presence and get links.
   • Linked In
   • Facebook
   • MySpace

Links can be a lot of work. Finding someone who has successfully optimized other law firm websites could save you a lot of time, but make sure they have a track record of SEO work they can show you.