Depending on the size of your law firm, you are going to have varying degrees of capability to invest money. Bigger law firms can afford to take bigger risks, and in turn, smaller law firms can only make smaller risks. So in order to keep your money stable, you may be inclined to avoid making major decisions with money that may make you bigger, but if it goes wrong, will blow up in your face. Skepticism towards search engine optimization, or SEO, is perfectly understandable; after all, it is a relatively new practice. In order to help you better grasp SEO and figure out whether it is needed for your law firm’s continued success, we will be talking about what advantages it brings to the table.
What are the advantages for a law firm to employ SEO?
First, let’s cover what SEO actually is. To put it simply, SEO is a system of marketing where a business will use search engines, such as Google and Bing, in order to get eyes onto their website from people searching for specific terms that are utilized in the article. This is accomplished by having content created for a website, usually a blog post, where the contents are designed to grab the attention of people browsing the Internet and, hopefully, get them to click further into your website and utilize your services. That is a little bit of a simplistic explanation, but it’s a good place to start off. It certainly does sound like a good boon if you can pull it off, but at the same time, it can be tricky.
The owner of a law firm may be unsure as to what exactly they need to invest into SEO. After all, how difficult could it be? You just write an article, include some keywords, and then ship it out, waiting for all the traffic it is about to bring in. Unfortunately, it is not that simple a process. I mean, it’s not rocket science, but there is a bit of a science to the process itself, you know? There are some articles written that we’ve seen where they tried to make it keyword-rich, to the point where it reads so poorly that it turns off the reader from the website. Either the keywords were so densely interspersed that it made the article an awkward read, or the keywords were not well integrated into the piece. Have you ever read an article where a certain phrase is featured in a grammatically problematic way? If you have, I’m sure it wasn’t the most impressive thing. The reason that is the case is because the phrase is the keyword itself, the thing they want to be in the search engines for when people search the term. It certainly can accomplish the first part, but the second part — retention of potential customers — is not so easily accomplished if the article is not compelling enough to keep them around. So instead of “Tax lawyer southern Minnesota,” it may be good to do “Tax lawyer in southern Minnesota” instead for better readability.
When you hire an SEO firm or an SEO specialist, the thing you need to understand is that you are paying them to understand what works and what does not, as well as for their experience with satisfied customers. Another thing that an SEO specialist knows is how to employ keywords. For instance, sometimes, it is good to have keywords that are specifically relevant to your law firm, such as actually dealing with legal issues, but a lot of the time, having adjacent terms utilized is the key to catching people’s attention. For example, a personal injury law firm may benefit from having an article about good driving practice to keep yourself from suffering an injury, or something of a similar nature. You also need to be mindful that the keyword(s) you choose do not have a lot of competition nor do they have a lack of interest.
Ultimately, the question is not necessarily going to be built around any idea of whether SEO is actually a beneficial thing, because its efficacy is indisputable in a general situation. However, one must still be able to understand whether it works for them specifically. SEO may be a good thing, but if you do not have the budget to afford it, doing it is not exactly the best financial decision to make. Either you may end up spending money that you do not actually have to get quality SEO services, or you spend your money on budget SEO services, which may not get the return a law firm should expect for these services. You must also be willing and able to be patient for the work to finish, as this is not going to be something that ends overnight and will take a while to finish and get results. Be sure to consult with an SEO firm or specialist who can help answer any questions you may have.
