Why should attorneys be interested in SEO?
Almost every law firm now has a website. Fewer and fewer people consult the phone book when looking for an attorney.
Google displays 24,700,000 total results for “law firm”.
Per month, there are 2,240,000 Google searches for “law firm”.
Here’s one lawyer SEO/internet marketing strategy, guaranteed to make your website popular with search engines:
Your website is incredibly important! You want a website that’s easy to navigate, professional, and able to track success.
WordPress is a fantastic platform.
If you’re still thinking of Wordpress as a personal blog, you should know it’s actually so much more—WordPress is now state-of-the-art publishing platform and an excellent tool for small or medium sized websites. You’ll need to install the software on your own server or with a 3rd party provider to access the many themes and plugins, run advertisements, edit the database, and even modify the PHP source code.
Wordpress websites can host galleries of videos and photos, forums and online communities, corporate portals, and of course blog posts. In our experience at Boomtown Internet Group, WordPress is an ideal solution for the websites of smaller businesses and law firms. WordPress websites can be set up quickly, easily publish content, and be optimized to show up in Google’s search results. Every page can be indexed by Google, which sometimes doesn’t happen in other more traditional CMS (content management) systems. Wordpress has many plugins and applications that make it easy for internal optimization, allowing you to build a website that features an attractive and functional design, and one that can easily be customized and managed yourself—not to mention it’s SEO-friendly.
Maintaining a functional and well-designed website is absolutely critical to your success as a lawyer and necessary when trying to attract new clients. In this day and age, the majority of clients will find you on the Internet and then contact you, and for that reason it’s important to appeal to clientele online. This entails tracking and monitoring your website and marketing efforts and then following up accordingly.
WordPress is both convenient and useful in that it provides you with the ability to update and edit content instantly, without assistance from a webmaster. You’re able to add additional web pages (not just to your blog) but to any page you wish, and to update your content whenever you’d like. This is crucial in that it allows you to stay current with all recent news and events. With other site platforms, this isn’t the case.
WordPress also allows you to upload videos to your site from your computer. Videos are a great form of online media and many lawyers use this as a way to personalize their website. Many clients expect to see videos and other interactive media when they visit your website so they can feel as if they “know” you before doing business. With WordPress, there’s no need to pay a lot of money to put a video up on your website. Shoot the video in your own office, and then upload it to your Wordpress website and to any other video sites on the internet. Wordpress provides Plugins for flash video players that allow you to host the video directly from your blog instead of YouTube, but you still have the option of uploading to Youtube first and then embedding on your website if you’d prefer.
WordPress allows you to store, publish, and archive your documents and to your website, without help from a webmaster. If your law practice puts out a monthly newsletter whether online or offline, upload the PDF version to your website. Google spiders appreciate the additional content, and your visitors will appreciate the collection of archived documents. If you’re not sending out a monthly newsletter, online or otherwise, consider doing so. It’s a great way to reach out to potential clients and drive website traffic.
WordPress allows you to track how visitors are converted in to clients. Your web developer needs to be able to help you create a compelling call to action that will provoke consumers reach out and say “I’m interested, let’s have a conversation.”
It is important that your website be well organized, attractive and professional, and also able to be quickly found.
Is your website SEO friendly? Here’s our Checklist for Making Lawyer Websites Popular With Search Engines.
Read the next blog post on Lawyer SEO/Internet Marketing Strategies…