Come join us for a 1 hour educational session on search engine marketing presented by Dan Stratford
Time: 3pm
Location:
Willows at The Boise Centre on the Grove
850 W. Front St.
Boise, ID 83702
Phone: (208) 336-8900
Common Internet Marketing Mistakes Attorneys Make When Building a Website
As I have stated many times before in this blog, in my conversations and in my seminars; there are more bad Internet marketing programs available for attorneys than there are good ones.
One of the most common mistakes I see them make is in the website building process.
MOST attorneys believe they need to have a website. So the first thing they do is build a website or hire someone to build it for them.
Example One: The attorney or law firm may decide to choose to “save money” by building a site themselves or having it done the “cheapest” way possible.
Example Two: The attorney may decide that they are willing to spend whatever it takes to have a beautiful site designed by a competent and creative web designer.
Which one of these attorneys is making the biggest mistake?
Answer: With this limited information we cannot really know which attorney or law firm is making the biggest mistake, but it seems they are both making the same mistake:
They may have both made the mistake of building a website as their first step to improving their web presence, when there are many other things they should have considered first.
Before building a website you need to ask yourself some key questions:
What do you expect from your website presence?
If you want to get new customers from your website, then you need to consider search engine marketing as an option. More people use a search engine like Google, Yahoo! or MSN to find an attorney than the yellow pages. (according to TMP Marketing). You may also want to consider local directories like yellowpages.com, dexknows.com, or vertical directories like lawyers.com, martindale.com and others.
If you simply want someone to find your site when they have been referred to you then you do not need to spend a lot of money on marketing your website.
However, in both cases you need to invest wisely in a website that will meet the following minimum criteria.
A: Represent your firm well online. More people will see your site than see your office. If you have a clean, professional office that puts a good foot forward for your firm, then you should also have a website that is clean, professional and content rich (like you!).
If you skimp on a website with an ugly template or fail to put good content on your site you may hurt your firm’s reputation rather than help it, and you may even lose a referral that checked out one of your competitor’s websites. When you are being compared online your referrals may feel your competition is better qualified to handle their legal needs.
I met one firm who apologized for their site when they got a referral call from someone who began the conversation; “I was looking at your website…”
As you can tell by my blog I am not a website designer; I am a search engine marketing expert. If you came here for some honest information about Internet marketing you have come to the right place, but if you want a website designed for your firm I would have to recommend an expert that works for me to do it for you.
Conversely; most web designers are not up to speed on the latest search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.
B: Your site needs to be search engine friendly.
You may not need an extensive SEO program to meet your needs, but if your website is not search engine friendly then your prospects or referrals may not even be able to find your site when they look you up by name in your city. Furthermore, if your site is built correctly from the start, then driving your site to the top of search engines like Google is going to be a lot easier, and you might even get up there for specific searches with very little additional effort.
I think it is worth repeating: most website designers are not up to speed on the latest search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. If it was my firm, and I was looking to build a website I would first begin looking for an SEO specialist. They can help you find a web designer that will build a site with search engines in mind, or they can manage the process for you so that your web designer builds your site correctly from the start.
Come back soon to learn how to find the answers to the questions below-and do not hesitate to call me at 720-985-7945 for a free consultation.
For what types of searches do you want your site to appear on Google and other search engines?
How competitive is your market?
Who are your competitors and what do their websites look like?
What is your budget for your website?
What should your budget for your website be?
How do you select a website designer?
How will you track the success of your web presence?
How much should you invest in an Internet marketing program?
Should you build your site yourself?
Yellow page has become a very tricky business. In this post I will attempt to give you some insight from my experience with the yellow pages, what I am hearing from other attorneys and even some reliable statistics on yellow pages vs. Internet usage.
(For a comprehensive analysis for your firm please feel free to call me anytime at 720-985-7945)
Don’t get me wrong-the yellow pages is a viable way to market a local service business, but in the current world it is often over priced and over rated by the people selling it. Of course, that can be said about many people selling advertising and marketing programs.
10 or 15+ years ago, businesses used to line up at the local yellow pages office (the “real yellow” pages-always associated with the phone company) to buy ads so they could grow their business. It was like trying to get Jonas Brother tickets. You had to get in line early, make the big decision on whether or not your were willing to spend a few hundred dollars a month on the biggest ad in your heading-which at one point was a “half page ad”.
Year after year the yellow pages grew the size of the ads, and admittedly accomplished some very high quality full color ads on paper that was maybe slightly thicker than the paper in a compact bible.
This program often worked very well for attorneys until recently.
Then came cover ads, spine, inside covers, tabs, magnets and even brochures and magazines delivered with the books. Not to mention all of the smaller community books. For example, I believe Dex Media (the YP for Qwest) has as many as 20+ books being delivered in the Denver metro area alone. The Yellow Pages for a long time has been a cash cow with huge profits-up to 60% on each book.
Then competitors like Yellowbook came into many towns and in some cases offered an excellent return on investment for the attorneys and other businesses in their markets. I will not try to explain in any detail how this affected the legal industry, because I know that many of the attorneys could tell that story better than I could.
Then came the search engines, and the shift from using the yellow pages to find local information to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others-but mostly Google.
I worked for Dex Media for a while at their headquarters working with product development and sales. From 2004 to 2005 we more than doubled the revenue Dex generated from Internet marketing, however, that did not make a dent in the lack of growth in the print side of the business-which at the time was a $1.6 billion source of revenue, vs. under $70k in Internet advertising revenue.
Let’s get some facts:
This report came out in October 2008 from TMP Directional Marketing; a reputable company that sells Pay Per Click marketing, Online Yellow Pages and Yellow Pages. They act as representatives for all of the major yellow pages across the country for businesses that need to advertise in multiple states but want one point of contact. They have credibility with me because they have to approach direct advertising from a consultative approach for national and international businesses like Pizza Hut and Porsche, and they have to deliver results to stay in business.
Here is the report they put out from their research last fall:
NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire - October 9, 2008) –2-Negotiate some pretty amazing deals
3-Get talked into a very bad Internet marketing strategy managed by their yellow pages provider
NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire - October 9, 2008) - TMP Directional Marketing (TMPDM), the largest local search marketing agency, announced today the findings of its second annual Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore, which confirms shoppers still use a variety of online and offline directional media resources to find local business information.
First sources used are Search Engines (31%)
Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%)
Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%)
Local Search Sites (11%)
61% of Searches are online searches
This represents a change from last year’s study, which ranked:
Print Yellow Pages first (33%)
Followed by Search Engines (30%).
Bottom Line: It is now very apparent that local search is being dominated by the Internet.
Come back soon for the best ways to capitalize on these drastic market changes-and how to win the negotiation battle with your yellow pages representative.
Think about Search Engine Optimization this way: no matter how good you are, if you are not getting yourself out on the Internet letting everyone know what you are doing, what your expertise is, how experienced you are and what makes you the right choice for your prospects-and on a regular basis, no one searching online for a lawyer will be able to find you.
Many attorneys want to get to the point where they can just practice law. They want the phone to ring with the best cases calling from referrals, or at least have the choice of operating this way once they have grown to the level they are comfortable with. Your referrals “Google” you by name, and as long as your site represents you well and is decently designed you should come up at the top of Google by name. Even the referral based firms need to remember that more people will see their website than see their offices, so they need to try to keep their website up to date and at a level that does not increase the risk of you losing referrals.
I was at a firm a few months ago that said every time the phone rang from a referral that said “I was looking at your website…” the attorneys cringed because as good as they were, their website looked very “last century”. They did not want to invest in optimization for advertising purposes, but they needed to be represented online at least as well as they were at their office location and through the words of others who were referring them business. A firm like this can get a fully customized website with RSS feeds, and add flash and video for a total cost of between $5K and $15K-with no need for significant time or money spent on Search Engine Optimization.
If you aren’t already famous, but think that you have something to offer, and you need more quality clients, then you need to treat the Internet like another community that you are reaching out to and getting to know. You need to “take Google out to lunch” and discover what they want from you for you to be considered an authority in your field and recommend you to the people who come to their site looking for an attorney like you.
You need to get up to date information about you and your firm online regularly. Taking a doctor out to lunch once every two years is not going to work as well as taking them out once a month or once a week.
How do you do that? The short answer is through blogs, press releases, forum postings, videos, emails and of course your website or websites.
If networking is not your strong suit, you might consider developing that skill or hiring a PR or sales/marketing specialist to do it for you. If you are not capable of implementing the strategies required to earn Google’s respect and have them begin to refer you business, and you do not want to spend your time learning how to be a website developer and optimization specialist, then you need to hire someone you can trust to do it for you.
How do you find someone to do it for you?
Check out my previous post on search engine optimization.
Of course, if you really wanted to be thorough, you could take the time to put together a comprehensive RFP (request for proposal) and ask 2-3 reputable SEO service providers to look at it, put together a proposal and present it to you.
The problem is that you are not likely to be an Internet marketing expert (if you are, that’s still only half the battle). Every SEO service provider has a story as to why you should hire them and not the other guy. Call me at 720-985-7945 and I will help you put an RFP together for free, as long as you let LexisNexis be one of the respondants to your RFP.
Meanwhile here is a link to an RFP outline you might consider using- rfp-outline.doc
Option 1: Your Yellow Pages Representative
Here are the positives of using this source:
If you are dealing with the major Yellow Pages Company in your region they may have a good program for advertising on their Internet Yellow Pages. The official “Phone Company” Yellow Pages usually has excellent usage, and provides a good return on investment. Verizon/Superpages typically has decent usage outside of their region because of their wireless brand that is known everywhere. Yellow Pages.com also has fairly good usage nationwide.
Dex Media usually provides good results in their region, but the jury is still out on new markets they are trying to enter like Las Vegas. They have a good television ad campaign, but it’s hard to beat the “verb”: Google.
You may have a good relationship with your rep if you have had the same rep for years. You probably trust them and they probably want to do what’s best for your business.
Risks of dealing with your Yellow Pages Representative as your Internet marketing consultant:
Here is what to watch out for:
Yellow Pages reps are under a lot of pressure to sell you as much advertising as they can-whether or not it is good for your business. This may result in them overselling their Internet Yellow Pages, and they will do everything they can to keep your print advertising. Back when I was working with Dex Media we were $1.6 Billion a year print media company, and even though we more than doubled the Internet revenue for the company-the end result was still under $70 Million in yearly revenue.
RH Donnelly/Dex and other major yellow pages companies are holding on tight to a sinking ship. You can still get a good quantity of calls from the yellow pages with the big ads and the outside cover products, but trusting them with your Internet money is risky. One of the major reasons is that the yellow pages companies do not specialize in attorney Internet marketing. In my previous post I elaborated on how that can be a problem.
Yellow Pages advertising does have merit, and many businesses profit from Yellow Pages advertising, but usage is declining and the return on investment is not as good as it used to be-certainly not as good as a quality Internet Marketing Strategy.
While the rep may have your best interests in mind, the experienced Yellow Pages rep rarely understands what the best Search Engine Marketing solution is for law firms. If they did, they probably would not try to sell you all of the Search Engine Marketing products their company offers. Utilize them for their online Yellow Pages, but you are probably better off utilizing an Internet Marketing Consultant to help you succeed with the search engines like Google, Yahoo! & MSN.
Be careful of any Search Engine Marketing program they try to sell you. The Yellow Pages companies are usually not completely “transparent” with where your clicks are coming from, and they may charge you as much as a 2,000% mark up (yes-TWO THOUSAND) on your Pay-Per-Click program to manage it for you. This can eliminate the potential return on investment that a program like this SHOULD be providing your business.
Their websites are usually packaged with marketing programs that are often over-priced. While often times a package deal sounds good, in this case it may be more costly than if you were to buy them separately or invest in a more law firm tailored program.
Next week I will be posting the Google rankings for the major online yellow pages in Seattle and Las Vegas for the top online lawyer searches.
Option 2: A Marketing Firm
Marketing firms can provide some great strategy development and big picture programs. I have yet to find one that truly understand the ins and outs of Internet marketing, and figured out how to implement a strategic Internet marketing program. If you find one, please let me know.
In many cases they are your outsourced “Creative Marketing Project Managers.”
This is very important, because when your whole marketing program is designed to work together it can be much more affective than the sum of the parts.
The downsides to utilizing this kind of service is that they will probably outsource anything to do with the Internet, and you will be relying on their discretion when it comes to picking a web designer or an Internet marketing firm.
They are often provided with referral commissions from the advertising they sell, and may be biased towards using media providers that pay higher commissions. I have seen some Marketing firms cut out their clients profitable advertising programs because they could not get paid commissions from that media provider.
Option 3: A Website Developer
MOST good web designers and web developers build great websites. Few of them are SEO experts and fewer still are Pay-Per-Click marketing experts. If they try to steer you away from Search Engine Marketing, you probably should steer away from them, or hiring an Internet Marketing company to work with them.
Lately I have seen a lot of well-designed sites on the front end, but on the back end they are still using pre-2005 search engine optimization strategies.
Option 4: An SEO Firm
There are some superb SEO firms out there-and there are also some scam artists. In a previous post I discussed what to watch out for when it comes to SEO firms. If you need help before then, please feel free to call me and I will help you avoid getting ripped off. You call me at 702-966-9414, 206-501-4569 or 720-985-7945.
Option 5: An Internet Marketing Firm
A high quality and trustworthy Internet Marketing firm will help you build a website that meets your specific needs and budget, and recommend a marketing plan that will help you grow your business. They will show you how to get the most for your marketing dollar utilizing the Internet, and also help you integrate it with your other marketing efforts. They will also help you avoid Internet scams.
It is hard to find a firm that has been around and is going to be around in 2+ years.
If you are going to trust anyone with your money-more specifically the potential success of your business, you need to check their references.
Most people I work with simply trust me, but I often think they are lucky that I am actually a trustworthy Internet Marketing consultant. So many people are so confused or naive about the Internet they want and need to trust someone, and often times it’s simply the first convincing person that comes along.
An Internet Marketing Firm That Focuses on Lawyers’ Needs
LexisNexis/Martindale Hubbell has the most comprehensive Internet marketing solution for attorneys that I am aware of nationwide. They are experienced, they are honest, and they have been at it a long time-long enough to learn what works and what does not. They Lawyers.com, Attorneys.com, they offer SEO services, Press Releases, Pay Per Call, Pay Per Click, semi-custom web sites and fully custom web sites. They even have a classy television advertising program that is affordable for smaller law firms.
Thomson Westlaw
I have discussed in previous posts how they fall short in meeting Lawyers’s needs, but they do know the industry. Attorneys tell me it is difficult to get them to live up to their SEO promises, because they tend to over promise more often than not.
In the last post on search engine optimization and pay per click marketing, I discussed how these two strategies could be used to help you get your web site to the top of Google.
In this post we will be talking about another way to get your site to the top of Google: Google Local (or Google Maps) and listing your site on directories. Next week I will discuss the 4th way, and as a bonus, a 5th way we do not normally discuss.
1. Google Local
Often, when a person goes to Google and does a search that includes local search terms like “Denver”, “Denver,CO ”Las Vegas”, or “Las Vegas,NV”, Google brings their “Local” or “Maps” results towards the top of the page. They used to bring back 2-4 results, but as of this writing they are bringing back around 10 results-and sometimes their are organic results above the Local results.
For example, if you type in:
lawyer las vegas,nv
You will see this screenshot: Google Search Results-’lawyer las vegas,nv’
You will see these firms at the top as part of the Google Local results, next to a map:
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Lionel Sawyer & Collins: Goldstein Mark H - www.lionelsawyer.com - |
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Jones Vargas: Cohen Douglas M - www.jonesvargas.com - |
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Kummer Kaempfer Bonner: Gronauer Robert J - www.kkbrf.com - |
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Santor Driggs Walch - www.santorodriggs.com - |
 |
Greenberg Traurig - www.gtlaw.com - |
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Albright, Stoddard, Warnick & Albright - albrightstoddard.com - |
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Lewis & Roca - www.lrlaw.com - |
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Thorndal Armstrong Delk - www.thorndal.com - |
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Mc Donald Carano Wilson - www.mcdonaldcarano.com - |
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Dempsey Roberts & Smith Ltd - vegaslawyer.net - |
Above this you may see sponsored results, and below you will see the “optimized”, “natural” or “organic” results. If you click on:
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More results near Las Vegas, NV » |
You will see a longer list, and you can browse the results.
As an attorney, how do you get your site listed in Google local?
Google populates their Local listings one of 2 ways:
For attorneys, Google only trusts one Legal Directory; Lawyers.com. As part of listing on Lawyers.com (the most used online lawyer directory according to ComScore, Hitwise and Nielson Ratings), you are automatically listed on Martindale.com, CitySearch, Superpages, Google Local and a bunch of others, with a link to your Lawyers.com listing. LexisNexis has made it easy for you to make sure you are listed on all of these online directories.
Attorneys and other businesses I have seen try to do it themselves have mixed results. Google is so busy that only about 50% of the time does self-submission work. Which means you may have to do it 2 or 3 times before it works.
How does Google determine who they show on the first page?
This is the million dollar question for which I have yet to get the answer.
I can tell you this:
It is not ONLY geography based. While it looks like they may be bringing back the results closest to the center of the city that was specified in the search, this is only one of the factors, and cannot be depended upon. If you are in Henderson, NV, or on the outskirts of Las Vegas, you probably won’t be able to move up to the top of Google Local for Las Vegas searches. However, if you are in very center of the city you are not guaranteed to appear at the top either.
The businesses that have optimized web sites seem to have the advantage in Google Local placement. Firms my company (LexisNexis) has optimized web sites for are consistently at the top of Google Local in addition to being at the top of the organic results for their search terms.
This leads me to believe that Google Local looks for some of the same things they look for in the organic results:
Quantity and quality of content.
Updated content.
Number of links to your web site.
How do you optimize your site to get to the top of Google?
See last weeks post on search engine optimization.
First of all:
Why get your website to the top of Google?
There are 4 ways to get your sit to the top of Google:
1-Pay-Per-Click marketing.
2-Search Engine Optimization
3-Google Local
4-Having your site listed on a site that is already there.
First of all; if anyone tells you that one of the above is the best, one of the worst, or the only way to get to the top of Google, then they are probably trying to sell you on their solution, rather than providing you with objective advice on what will work best to meet the needs of your firm.
The benefits and challenges of each:
1-Pay-Per-Click marketing.
The biggest benefit to Pay-Per-Click marketing is that you generate revenue for Google and potentially help drive up their stock price. So the strategy here is to buy their stock, and invest the rest of your money into thousands and thousands of dollars of Google Adwords advertising.
OK-that was a joke. I was just pandering to all of the sceptics out there.
The truth is that I have seen very poorly run Google Adwords campaigns, and I have seen very well run Google Adwords campaigns. I hate to say it, and I might lose my Google certification for stating this; but some of the worst Google Adwords campaigns I have seen have been the ones that people have had Google setup for them. I had a client who was spending about $800 a month on Google Adwords, but $200+ of that was for clicks that were not relevant to his business. He had relied on Google to set it up for him and they had not set it up in his best interest.
After my consultation we created a win-win-win situation: He spent more money on Google Adwords for more targeted and more profitable keyword terms, therefore Google increased their revenue, searchers found what they were looking for and the business increased profits.
The bottom line is that you have to know the ins and outs or pay someone who knows the ins and outs of Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search marketing or you will most likely waste much of your budget on paying for clicks that are not generating the most profit for your firm.
If you are going to learn the ins and outs you are going to have to be fairly technologically savvy, and spend 5-20 hours going through Google tutorials, and then learn from mistakes you will make in the first few months even after going through the tutorials. Of course you will have to do the same thing for other Pay-Per-Click programs as well. You will not have to re-learn everything for each Pay-Per-Click program, because they have their similarities. However, if you miss the differences it can cost you. What works on Google does not necessarily work the same way on Yahoo!.
When deciding on whether or not to become an expert on Pay-Per-Click yourself you have to ask yourself two questions:
1-How much is your time worth? You probably bill out at $300-$500+ and hour, and if you have a family or enjoy other activities like golfing or biking, then spending 5-20 hours learning about and 2-5 hours a month managing your Pay-Per-Click programs might be very costly.
That’s at the very least $8,700 a year in billable hours you spend on yourself managing your Pay-Per-Click program-and probably a lot more.
2-Who can you trust to manage your Pay-Per-Click program?
That’s another challenge to Pay-Per-Click marketing. While I do not believe having Google or Yahoo! setup your campaign is your best options, finding “some guy” to do it is probably not any better. LexisNexis/Martindale Hubbell offers this service to attorneys, Findlaw/Westlaw does not. There are a bunch of start ups and boutique firms that might also do a good job for you, but it is hard to find one that is dependable.
Make certain whoever you choose meets the following criteria:
a-They will let you have final word on the keyword phrases they use.
b-They tell you what search engines you will be on.
c-They allow you the choice of geo-targeting (IP targeted) and content targeting, but they do not force this on you (they better know what geo-targeted and content targeted means)
d-They give you monthly reports.
e-They are a legitimate company.
f-They have other customers (hopefully attorneys) they are providing this service for.
g-They limit the number of campaigns they will run in a certain area of practice in a certain geographic area.
2-Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is a service or a skill requiring a lot of expertise and a lot of time-not a product you can pay for.
Search Engine Optimization can raise the ranking of your site so that you appear higher in the “organic”, “natural” or “optimized” side of the search result on Google, Yahoo! and others.
These are the advantages to having a well optimized site:
What are the challenges of optimizing your site?
The number one challenge is figuring out who you can trust to optimize your web site.
Option 1: Learn how to do it yourself.
NOT RECOMMENDED for attorneys. The attorney market is so competitive for Search Engine Optimization that you would have to spend hundreds of hours learning how to optimize your site and implementing the optimization-every year.
You would need to learn HTML, learn how to code the HTML on each page of your site differently, write gobs of content, change and add to the content everyday, make sure the content was properly linked-and these are just some of the things you would have to do to your website-not to mention building the site in the first place.
Then you would have to figure out how to build hundreds of links to your site from others.
You could learn how to do all of this, but it could be the equivalent of at least 1 full time semester in college.
Option 2: Hire someone to do it for you.
The biggest challenge in having someone do it for you is finding an SEO service provider you can trust.
An SEO service company pitch usually goes like this:
“Pay us X thousands of dollars and see what happens.”or
“Sign a long term contract with us for x thousands of dollars and see what happens.”
Neither of these approaches are advantageous for most attorneys-and few of them actually deliver the results you want.
The problem is that it is hard to hold an SEO firm accountable, because they cannot guarantee results. Most of them will not tell you what they are doing to your site every month. It would be nice if more of them were “transparent”.
In addition, there is not room for everyone on the first page of Google.
There is only one company I know of that are breaking the mold when it comes to “transparency and SEO“:
LexisNexis/Martindale Hubbell is actually offering an SEO service for attorneys that is as transparent as it can be. They provide the attorney with an estimate of the hours it will take to provide a successful SEO campaign based on the competitive landscape of the keywords. The attorney receives reports every month with reports services provided so that the attorney can hold them accountable. They also help you track leads so you can see how well your program is working for you by determining your return on investment and/or cost per customer acquisition.
No one else that I know of is providing that transparent of a service for attorneys.
In addition, after successful beta tests where they provided this service to just a few dozen firms across the country, they are now only offerring it to a few attorneys in each market, because there truly is limited space at the top of the search engines. If SEO is one of your marketing goals you better call one of your local LexisNexis/Martindale reps ASAP to to see if you qualify for this service.
Come back next week or call me to discuss other ways to move your firm to the top of Google: Dan Stratford at 702-966-9414.
I think it is appropriate to begin this blog dedicated to the Truth About Lawyer Internet Marketing discussing the effectiveness of blogs.
I am obviously a believer of blogs and the value of blogs to the readers and writers of them, but they are not THE answer for attorneys.
Hold on a minute:
Blog writing tip #1:
DON’T write your blog online. Write it in another program like Word or a text document. When you are done, login to your blog and then copy and paste it as a new post. If you have ever gone through writing a lot of content in a blog, email or website only to lose your connection AND your content you will know why I am suggesting this.
In fact, I switched to a Word document after I wrote the second sentence in this post, after remembering the potential pain of not doing so.
Back to this post:
While a blog can be a good way to generate traffic to your website, it is better utilized as a means for you to engage with your potential prospects and current customers with current advice on topics they may be interested in like new tax laws, new medical malpractice issues and other current events.
In fact, one of the great things about blogs is that the search engines love them, and you can easily update them to reflect news events like the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada Hepatitis and HIV scare that is going on right now.
Of course, this blog is competing against a host of other blogs and press release organizations, and I would be surprised if just by posting to this blog I could appear at the top of Google for the search: Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada.
Some of you may have heard that blogging will bring your website to the top of Google or Yahoo!, and that you just need to “blog, blog and blog more”-link to your site and watch it rise to the top.
This may work in less competitive markets for less competitive keywords (like “rodent racing”, as Peter Kent always says), but it is not sufficient for a competitive market like Real Estate, Insurance, and of course; the highly competitive attorney market.
The fact is that you must generate tens, hundreds or even thousands of links to your site if you are going to win the battle to get to the top of Yahoo! or Google for search terms like ‘injury lawyer las vegas’.
One quality link from your blog will not do the trick.
The moral of the story is; keep on blogging if you want to, but don’t expect miracle placement for your website as a result.
There are other things you can do that will generate higher rankings on Google and Yahoo! that are much more efficient.
What can you do to get your site to the top of Google?
THAT is the question.
Getting an honest answer to it can be very tricky.
Until now.
You can ask me through the form on this blog, wait until my next post, or call me at 702-996-9414 to schedule a free Internet marketing consultation for your firm.
Have fun blogging!