Internet Marketing for Law Firms: Are You Tracking the Competition?
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If you have a lot of competitors who are SEO savvy or see the value in hiring an SEO expert, they may be working just as hard as you are to increase their rankings -- and only 10 of you can be on Google’s first page!
Savvy SEO people are constantly analyzing their competitors to find out what they are doing and what can be done to “beat” them in the rankings, especially for highly competitive practice areas in major metro areas like Phoenix.
SEO, like most marketing strategies, is always a function of time or money. To win at SEO, you must invest in one or the other. Either you need to learn how to do SEO for yourself (invest a lot of your time) or hire someone to do it for you (invest your money).
If you chose to do it yourself, be prepared for a steep learning curve. I have personally invested tens of thousands of dollars hiring top SEO experts and going to industry conferences to learn what I know, but it is still a never ending struggle to stay with the pack, much less ahead of the curve! When you are looking to hire a link building expert, be sure they know the legal industry. It’s entirely different building links for a law firm versus a retail store or a hardware store or even an information product company selling books online.
Remember: you get what you pay for. Be very wary of anything that sounds too good to be true. Just today I came across a link building company that was offering 13,000 inbound links for $150 and they would do it all in 7 days! Two words: run away!
In SEO, you should always be skeptical if the price is too low. Top people who get results can and do charge a premium for their specialized skills, just like a top flight litigation attorney would command a fee near the top of the market. What's the worst that could happen? It is very likely that a company charging such low prices are using several techniques Google considers to be “black hat” (or illegal) and in all likelihood your website will be blacklisted by Google and perhaps even banned from the search engine!
Google has teams of PhD experts who look for unnatural linking patterns, like when a website suddenly gets thousands of inbound links over a brief period of time. Link building is best done slowly over time from a wide variety of websites.
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Stephen knows what he is talking about. I encourage anyone reading this blog to either speak with Stephen and his team and/or attend his retreat.
One element not in here for law firms to consider is that the changing search engine result page has dramatically changed SEO as well. As most smaller law firms are local or regional in nature, traditional organic listings are often limited to 3-4 listings at the very bottom of the page, well "below the fold" and being crowded out by things like Google Maps and Google Places listings. Those are different elements to optimize and emerging as more important for locally-focused firms as they get more real estate on the page. An organic link dropping from page 1 to page 2 can have a massive decrease in direct traffic, and the time/cost investment equation may not work in one's favor. SEO is still important, and keeping up with these kinds of changes is critical.