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

Most lawyers practice multiple areas of law. A family law attorney may also provide bankruptcy representation and occasionally help accident and injury victims. A corporate lawyer may also take high profile personal bankruptcy cases and so on.

When putting together your online law firm marketing strategy, you should think about the types of cases you really want to pursue. Do you want to increase your bankruptcy business or tap into more accident and personal injury cases?

If you want to build up a particular practice area, your website will convert better if you narrow your primary focus on one or two of those practice areas you want to improve.

Of course you can still list your other practice areas on your website and provide valuable content around those areas, but keep your home page and link building efforts focused on the primary practice areas.

Optimizing for the right practice area is one aspect of your legal marketing that is not about algorithms or technical implementation. Instead, it is centered around how you would like to see your law firm grow.

From that point, your search engine optimization specialists are responsible for discovering the most popular keyphrases for your primary practice areas.

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

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/seolawfirm

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