You won’t read a single marketing article without the mention of ‘keywords’ or ‘search engine optimization’ these days. And for good reason.
SEO is crucial to getting ahead of your competition, but there are a few things you need to understand in order to truly master this marketing tactic.
Truth #1
SEO is essential to your firm’s marketing success, but that doesn’t mean results are instantaneous. One of the reasons it’s recommended to include paid-per-click advertising and social media ads in your marketing strategy is that using keywords to generate organic search results takes time.
Results from SEO efforts depend on several different factors, such as your firm’s website content and technical SEO and obtaining high-quality backlinks to your site.
Not only does the content on your site need to be unique, but you also need to post new content to stay relevant. This requires a lot of researching and writing. Additionally, the days of stuffing keywords like ‘family law’ or ‘malpractice suits’ into copy and getting results are over. Keywords need to be thoughtfully incorporated into your content to achieve successful SEO results.
Technical SEO refers to the aspects of your site that take place behind the scenes. For example, your site speed, meta descriptions, and the technology driving your website all need to do their part when it comes to driving traffic to your site. These components can be managed and maintained by your site developer or an SEO professional.
Finally, backlinking is the slowest component of your SEO strategy. For the most part, backlinking is out of your control but can be encouraged. Backlinks are inbound links to your site from another reputable site.
The best way to improve your backlinking strategy is to create useful or interesting content about a niche practice area and/or relevant legal topics. Other related sites may find your article and link to it to increase their own authority on the subject matter.
While backlinking is often out of your control, there are ways to encourage highly sought-after sites to link to one of your articles. This is done by first creating unique content and second, by submitting worthy content to established and reputable outlets for publishing in their article section. Of course including a link from the article to your website is the key.
Truth #2
Social media on its own does not increase your SEO efforts. Your social media pages are not ranking signals and cannot impact how your law firm website ranks. While your social media pages may rank independently in search results, they do not influence your website search results.
However, this doesn’t mean social media can’t be used to boost your SEO. Social media is an excellent tool you can and should be utilizing to drive traffic to your site. For example, using social media to share your content can increase traffic and engagement to your firm’s site, ultimately increasing your website ranking. This can also expand the reach of your content, driving a higher number of backlinks to your site.
Truth #3
SEO is not a one-time task. This strategy requires ongoing attention and effort. SEO is driven by user needs which are constantly evolving. Therefore SEO is a continually changing field.
As users change their search behavior, your SEO strategies will need to be monitored and updated. For example, as more users switch to mobile searches, your site needs to be optimized for accessibility on various screen sizes.
Another recent change is talk-to-text searches. We don’t always speak the same way we type. The right SEO strategies can capture these minor but impactful changes.
Finally, Google and other search engines regularly adjust algorithms and release updates that impact your firm’s page rankings. This means if your SEO strategy isn’t maintained, it may not be as effective when changes are made to improve user experiences. For example, Google may favor the addition of an SSL certificate or a certain page load speed.
Like it or not, SEO isn’t going away any time soon. Coming to terms with these critical SEO truths will help ensure your SEO strategy continues to drive your firm to the top of search engine rankings.
