Cost
A search engine optimization company is going to charge your law firm a base price to do the initial research and optimization. When stacked against your design and development cost, it’s almost always cheaper to use the same company for both, rather than two separate law firm marketing firms.

Content Management System
Not all content management systems are created equally. In fact, a lot of content management systems (or website editors) are not search engine optimization friendly. If your law firm website is not on an SEO friendly platform, it will have to be converted to one in order to have an effective online law firm marketing campaign.

Specialized
It pays to work with a specialist. Every industry has different needs, and attorneys are no different. By working with a professional legal marketing company to handle your website design and search engine optimization, you are covered on both exposure and conversion. More than half of the existing websites that we take on for search engine optimization require design changes to improve conversion.

While the optimal case includes both design and SEO, you can transfer an existing design to SEOLawFirm.com if the design is less than two years old. It can still generally be converted to our SEO friendly content management system and optimized. That is not to say that some changes will not be necessary, but a complete overhaul may not be required.

Semi-custom lawyer websites are also available for a new low price for lawyers with a smaller law firm marketing budget who require a professional look and feel.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

We felt that many legal directories did not offer the features that helped convert traffic to phone calls or offer quality inbound links. We built our directory with search engine optimization in mind, allowing hyperlinked keyphrases in the listings, video integration, Google Maps integration, and much more.

You can never have too many lawyer directory listings on the Web and at $25/month, the SEOLawFirm.com Find a Lawyer Directory is one that fits in any law firm’s budget.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

But if nobody pays attention to the people who are supposed to be paying attention, how can you be sure anything is getting done?

When selecting your law firm marketing company, make sure you have a designated account manager. Someone who stays up-to-date on your law firm’s progress and knows what is going on. Someone who you can always call or email with questions short and long.

If you can’t get a hold of anybody at your legal marketing company and nobody is paying attention to what they are doing, it is a safe assumption that nothing is getting done.

After all, a good law firm marketing company will have staff that merges geeky technical brilliance with effective marketing experience.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

While they may believe they are impressing their hopeful clients, in a way, they are defrauding them with confusion.

Let’s review the process in its most basic form.

Google is simply software. Though large, complex, and ever evolving, Google’s search engine is simply a program.

To make your lawyer website rank higher in this program (Google), you need a lot of content and strong inbound links from high quality websites. All website links matter to a degree, but others give your website a higher endorsement.

So a small blog with a few readers means something, but a major news site publishing your law firm’s news and linking to your website – that means a lot. A good search engine optimization strategy will include getting various types of links to your site from mid-quality to high quality while also building the number of pages on your law firm’s website.

It’s a simple concept which requires a team of consistent professionals. However, it’s not magic, trade secrets, or hocus pocus. It is simply science.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

People and businesses that need legal representation are everywhere. They are at coffee shops using their Blackberry’s, Droids, and iPhones. They are at the office connecting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. They are on Google and Yahoo searching for answers to their legal questions.

Where are you?

The Internet is a giant speaker and you hold the microphone. Law firms used to be dependent on television advertisements that cast a wide net of generic recognition. Many attorneys used billboards on the interstate that costs thousands of dollars each month. Many small firms have paid phone books and Yellow Pages more money each year than they paid themselves. To grow your law firm, you have to think creatively and spend less on traditional marketing and more online.

Using social networks and search engine optimization, you can reach out to your target market. Rather than casting a wide net and spending thousands of dollars to reach a small group of people you hope are paying attention, search engine marketing allows you to be present to an audience that you can see.

Online, you can count eyes. You can count clicks. You can see how the Internet is converting Web traffic to office traffic and that is only the beginning.

Summertime is almost over. Let’s get back to building your law firm.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

When designing your website, your designer should take into consideration the style, color schemes, and feeling that your brand instills. However, the market downturn and slow recovery are tightening the budgets of many law firms and some are making the mistake of putting off their online marketing goals.

Your law firm must be online and the website must be professional. Even if you predominately do traditional marketing, you have to have a website that converts those visitors into new cases. But now, you don’t have to spend a lot of money.

In direct response to the changing economic environment, SEOLawFirm.com has created the Semi-Custom Lawyer Website, a complete website solution for $2,500.00.

Unlike other “template” solutions, the Semi-Custom Lawyer Website offers small law firms 14 unique designs (and growing). These designs are then customized by SEOLawFirm.com’s design team to match your law firm’s brand. Once completed, no two Semi-Custom websites look exactly the same, thus giving your firm a unique and professional online presence.

Content writing and search engine optimization services are available as supplemental services and hosting starts at $12.95/month. However, if you provide your own web content, the total cost of the Semi-Custom Lawyer Website including design customization, easy to use content management system, onsite blog capable of handling unlimited blog entries, sitemaps, initial page building (up to 20), social networking icons, and statistics will not cost a penny more than $2,500.00 (for a limited time – $2,700.00 after promotional period).

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

When having a website built for your firm, it is important to own your website. Your law firm’s site is a lot more than just an advertisement. Over time, it is going to be a financial investment as well as a time investment as you work with your marketing company to add content to the site and turn the website into a powerful marketing tool.

Some legal marketing companies design websites that are only leased to your firm and then if you leave, they sell your website to you to take somewhere else. Of course if the site was built on a proprietary content management system (website editor), you will have to pay to have the design programmed into an out of the box content management system. Once you calculate the cost of buying your website (again) and having it programmed into a content management system, it is generally less expensive to have a new site built from scratch.

Here are some important questions to ask your prospective legal marketing/website design company.

1) Who owns my custom website design and content? – If the answer is anything but an unconditional “you,” run away. Unless the company is offering a discounted template based plan (in which case they rightfully own the design), you should own the design and all content that was custom created for you.

2) Is the content management system proprietary? – If the company uses a proprietary content management system, your exit strategy is going to require an additional re-programming investment of $1,000 – $4,000 depending on the advanced features of your site. It is best if the company uses an off the shelf or open source content management system because that makes your site compatible with 90% of standard web hosting companies.

3) How will my website be found? – The value of your website will forever be unknown if nobody finds it. If the company says “we build links” or “we optimize your site,” you should demand a detailed outline of how this is done. Adding one keyphrase on your home page or linking to your site from one of their directories is not a sufficient search engine optimization strategy. Request details. Good companies are generally eager to show off their robust marketing packages if they truly stand above the competition.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Many lawyers that come to us in search of a quality law firm marketing partner often serenade us with stories and legends from their quest. By this point, I would like to believe we have heard it all, but the sad reality is that there is plenty more to come.

The object of search engine optimization is to reach local clientele who are in need of legal counsel in your practice area. It’s a pretty simple concept but getting ranked on the first page in many metro areas requires a lot of work. Google basically is looking for a short list of items.

1) Quality website – An attorney website that is easy to navigate by both human users and the Googlebot.

2) Quality content – A useful website contributes something to the world in the form of valuable content. The more useful the content, the higher quantity of content, the more favor you will be granted with your ranking.

3) Inbound links – The Google democracy states that the more websites which link to a website, the higher quality the content must be. This should be achieved with content, social networks, directories and news releases.

So that is the basic recipe for a well-optimized attorney website. However, sometimes we hear some pretty crazy things.

These two items have made it to our top list of hocus pocus SEO claims.

Just Buy a Domain – False

The Internet created several millionaires who simply registered a good domain name before anybody else. Such popular sales like Office.com and Furniture.com raised millions for their owners. However, buying a domain name for your law firm is not going to help your search engine rankings.

When you purchase a domain name from an individual (rather than a registrar like Enom, GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc.) you have to change the registrar information. This is the data that identifies the owner of the domain, which would be you after the purchase. When the owner registrar data changes, Google sets the domain’s pagerank to zero thus making your newly purchased pre-existing domain name the same value as a name you purchase brand new for $12.

The Magical Google Machine – False

This one is probably our favorite. Everybody knows that Google’s algorithm is constantly improving for the better (or worse depending on who you ask). These changes are generally minor and affect a small percentage of the websites in Google’s index.

We have heard that some companies claim to have inside information that allows them to receive algorithm changes then magically implement them into all of their client websites with the click of a mouse.

The problem with this claim is that it contrasts with how the algorithms really work. The things that Google changes often have to do with the way they analyze links to your website from other sites on the Web. It’s not a matter of “we used to have the secret word ‘cheese’ in the meta tag and now we prefer ‘penguin,’” it’s more along the lines of “social network links now contain a separate powerful value than links from individual websites.” Or items like the XML sitemap where Google requests that you generate this script that pre-crawls your website to simplify their indexing process.

Neither of those real changes can be implemented with the preverbal flip of a switch; it takes a little effort.

Effort is probably the best way to achieve a page one ranking. When selecting an online legal marketing company, make sure you are paying for measurable services, and that the company you select will put forth a strong effort in getting your website highly ranked for your law firm’s relevant terms.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network