Understanding SEO and How It Can Help Your Legal Practice
This special blog post is written by Jennifer Horowitz who is the Director of Marketing for www.EcomBuffet.com. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on SEO and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer is the editor of the popular Spotlight on Success: SEO and Marketing newsletter.
Understanding SEO and How It Can Help Your Legal Practice
SEO is considered the foundation of any successful website marketing campaign. SEO now garners media attention and has become a common acronym used in conversations daily by businesses. However, in spite of the increasing recognition and mainstream acceptance of SEO it still remains a bit of an enigma to most.
With a few simple analogies and a little bit of background information I will teach you more about SEO, what it is, why it’s important, and most importantly how it can impact your legal practice.
What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website (making changes to the code and text) to properly convey your keywords and your site's theme to search engines -- so that you may be found using those keywords related to your service offering.
The goal is to increase targeted traffic to a web site.
SEO refers to getting listed in the "natural" (or organic) search results. This does not include the paid listings (also known as PPC or sponsored listings) you see on the right side and top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
SEO is an Internet Marketing strategy, and is widely considered to be the foundation of a marketing campaign.
For those with a little taste for the technical: optimizing a website involves on-page and off-page techniques. On-page optimization involves editing the website’s content and HTML code to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the spiders and bots (we call these issues Search Engine Friendliness Issues). On-page optimization includes strategies, like: Meta tags, bolding, interlinking, keyword rich content, XML sitemap feeds and more.
Who should worry about SEO? Anyone that has a website and wants to grow their business.
Why is SEO so important?
- The higher a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
- 70% of households do some kinds of search for a local product or service on a daily basis.
- Over 400 million searches are performed online every single day.
- More than ever consumers do research online before going to a store or office to make a purchase or retain services.
- Consumers are savvier and before deciding on a service provider, like an attorney, they will do research online and the first credibility factor is how high your site comes up on top of the engines when they search.
- More than 8 out of 10 Internet users look on search engines to find information and the products or services they want to buy
- Up to 85% of searchers ignore paid listings.
- 63% of the top natural (organic) listings get click throughs.
- Natural (organic) search results convert 30% higher than PPC.
- A new study from the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future has “found that the Internet is perceived by users to be a more important source of information for them —over all other principal media, including television, radio, newspapers, and books.”
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Chicago - Friday, October 16 & Saturday, October 17
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To register for a Rainmaker Retreat or for more information, please visit our website.
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