SEO for Lawyers: The Attorney’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization for Law Firms – Part 1

Welcome to the SEO for Lawyers Tutorial Series

The Internet offers many opportunities for attorneys, but in order to truly take advantage of them, you need to be visible. In other words, you need to show up in attorney search results on Google and Bing for your law firm’s practice areas.

Traditionally, lawyers have advertised through the following mediums:

• yellow pages
• television advertising
• radio advertising
• direct mail
• referrals

In fact, many lawyers built successful businesses on referrals alone. However, when the Internet and search engines came — it changed everything.

Now, when someone gets a lawyer’s name as a referral, they may Google it before they ever even make contact with the lawyer.

What if nothing comes up? What if the wrong site comes up? What if bad information comes up?

What if the competition comes up?

The only real control you have over search results, is through a process called search engine optimization (aka SEO). This process will be discussed in an in depth and practical manner in this free online SEO for Lawyers series.

In fact, other lawyers are even paying to learn similar information from books and seminars. However, if you subscribe to this series by email and read each lesson, you will learn for free what I could easily turn into a book or seminar and charge $100 or more for.

If your a solo lawyer that needs to compete with financially rich competitors, you will generally have one arena where you can compete effectively with their marketing budgets — the Internet.

If you are in any way responsible for marketing a law firm, you should learn the basics of SEO. Even successful firms need to be aware of the importance of SEO for lawyers if they want to stay on top and remain relevant in tomorrow’s legal economy.

It is my firm belief that every law firm should be concerned about their Internet marketing present and future. To ignore how the Internet and Google has changed legal marketing, would be a big mistake for any firm.

Even if you do not yet have a website, you should be interested in SEO for lawyers and learn what you can about it. This series was written for your benefit and it is my firm belief that every lesson in this series has useful information that can help someone improve the search engine performance of their website.

Why You Should Pursue Search Traffic?

It seems everyone wants to be listed at the top of a popular search phrase these days — including lawyers. However, the first page of organic search results typically only have 10 available positions for a website to be listed in. Given that most searchers never see the second page, it is highly desirable to be in the top ten.

If you were a personal injury lawyer in Chicago, you would want to rank in the top ten for a search like “Chicago injury lawyer.” Given that your website would be competing with every other personal injury lawyer and Workers’ Compensation attorney website in Chicago for this search, your odds of easily achieving a top ten placement would not be that good.

Despite the odds, however, many lawyers are still pursuing this objective spending thousands on Search Engine Optimization for lawyers and link building campaigns in order to get to the top of Google.

Why would they risk the time and money?

Because being in the top ten of a popular Google search can lead to a substantial number of new client leads and increased prosperity.

There are many factors that influence whether a site will rank in Google or not. However, the primary influential factor is believed to be the quality of inbound links a site has.

If you are not willing to do what it takes to acquire web links to your site, then you will have a difficult time achieving a top search position for a popular keyword phrase. However, popular keyword phrases are not the only phrases which drive traffic to a site. As a result, even basic SEO for lawyers can deliver noteworthy results — just not the mega results that popular phrases will.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of getting a website to the top of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) listings for desired keyword searches.

Before learning the art of SEO, however, one must understand how search engines work.

Can You Do SEO Yourself?

Maybe, but most lawyers do not have the time to do SEO. However, it is a skill that can be learned much quicker than programming. In fact, many so-called SEO experts are not necessarily programmers or web designers. They are just people who have spent enough time learning SEO, observing web analytics, managing web content, and marketing websites to know what works and what does not.

Stay Tuned for Part II of this SEO for Lawyers Series

Now that you know the “Why” and “What” of SEO for lawyers, you are ready to learn the “How” –which will be presented in upcoming posts.  You can easily stay tuned to the latest posts in this series by subscribing to our RSS feed or by subscribing to this blog via email (delivered by Google Feedburner and spam safe).