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 evident
that all legal firms need to tap into that traffic.
After publishing your own site, SEO is the most recommended and
beneficial course of action, but, SEO is confusing. At its worst,
SEO is a maddening exercise in losing money and time.
You’ve devoted 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 concerns about your website and Internet
legal client marketing surface.
The world is vibrant with talk about Search Engines (the Big 3:
Google, Yahoo and MSN, in particular). Everyone wants a piece of the
action, but even with all this buzz – there is so much that is not
being said.
All our clients have their own legal website. Many 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 exposure in
our directories turns out to be their most cost effective new client
acquisition method.
Perhaps, 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 continuious SEO work and substantial
cash outlays. Plus, usually there are no guarantees; unsuitable SEO
work can actually decrease your rankings and/or get one's site
de-listed for certain major search engines.
It all winds down to top keyword placement in the organic results of
the search engines. Legal keywords are some of the most competitive
for rankings. Everyone 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 expended in the search engine optimization efforts.
Our specific city legal directory approach presents 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. Bringing
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!
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