Lawyers: Why your Website is NOT Enough

By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2007 Promotions Unlimited All rights reserved. This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorized use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.

With 84.8% of Internet users finding the websites they frequent and do their shopping at by using search engines, it becomes apparent that all legal firms need to tap into that traffic.

After publishing your own site, SEO is the most recommended and helpful course of action, but, SEO is complicated. At its worst, SEO is a maddening exercise in losing money and time.

You’ve invested time, money and emotion into this website and still it is not generating the hoped for traffic. This is when excitement can begin to fade, and doubts about your website and Internet legal client marketing surface.

The world is buzzing with talk about Search Engines (the Big 3: Google, Yahoo and MSN, specifically). Everyone wants a piece of the action, but even with all this publicity – there is so much that is not being said.

Everyone our clients have their own legal website. A lot also have two or more websites. You might think with their own sites, what's the point of paying us for placement in one of our city specific legal directories?

The simple fact is our legal sites generate highly directed legal traffic for our clients legal specialties. The cost of advertising in our directories turns out to be their most cost effective new client acquisition method.

Maybe, lawyers should understand before embarking on a SEO program, that website designers are NOT SEO experts. Many of our clients have had very good sites. They have very 'in' color combinations, easy navigation, fast loading and basic meta tags. However, their sites are not within the first three pages for their major keywords.

To effectively optimize a legal website with a highly competitive keyword, takes a commitment to on-going SEO work and substantial cash outlays. Plus, usually there are no guarantees; incorrect SEO work can actually decrease your rankings and/or get one's site de-listed for certain major search engines.

It all comes down to top keyword placement in the organic results of the search engines. Legal keywords are some of the most competitive for rankings. Every site owner wants to be on page one of the returned search results. Even page two or page three of the major search engines will produce dramatic traffic increases. Beyond page three placement results will usually not produce the results needed to cover the time put in the search engine optimization efforts.

Our specific city legal directory approach offers our clients with a highly optimized site whose standing can be verified prior to joining. With the guess work removed, keyword standings and traffic verified, this is a far more cost effective approach in comparison to hiring a professional to do SEO on the firm's own site. Steering this point home is the fact that with multi-year algorithm revisions by the search engines, and thousands of new sites vying for top positions, SEO to be successful must be an on-going labor intensive process.

Copyright 2007 Promotions Unlimited SEO services All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Schwartz runs 15 legal directory sites, a few of which are: Los Angeles lawyers, Las Vegas lawyers, San Francisco lawyers, California lawyers, Dallas lawyers Promotions Unlimited started out as a general search engine optimization firm but has morphed into a specialized search engine optimization service. Our attorney client’s results through our directories have proven to be far more cost effective compared to Yellow Pages advertising. What is surprising to us is the amount of skepticism still prevalent among legal practitioners about the effectiveness of the Internet to generate new business. Some times old habits die hard!