SEO vs. PPC: Which One Should my Law Firm Use?

We’ve previously discussed what does and doesn’t work for lawyer SEO on our Law Firm SEO page, but let’s go a little bit further into the specific techniques our lawyer SEO strategists use to give our clients’ websites maximum visibility. At LawSudo, our team uses primary SEO strategies when building and maintaining our clients’ websites:

• Maps Listing Optimization. Google Maps is how your clients are going to physically locate your firm’s office. Your firm’s proximity to your clients can play a role in whether they opt to work with you or a closer firm – convincing clients who live far why they should make the long drive to work with you is a job for our content writers. When prospective clients search for law firms online, they often pair the type of case they have with their city. Our lawyer SEO optimization team makes sure our clients’ firms appear on Google Maps’ search results;
• Consolidated Advertising. You’re launching an online marketing campaign. Lawyer SEO plays a role in making every aspect of your online marketing efforts visible. Instead of targeting every online platform individually, our lawyer SEO experts make consolidated efforts to advertise our clients’ firms on multiple channels, reaching a broad audience of prospective clients;
• Organic SEO We utilize lawyer SEO techniques with humans, not search engine spiders, in mind. That means that our team makes use of white hat techniques like appropriate use of keywords,
• High-quality content that educates and engages your readers, linking to high-quality websites, and internal linking to create sustainable levels of visibility; and
• Performance Tracking. Our team doesn’t just set up websites and leave them alone. Effective lawyer SEO means constantly tracking a website’s performance on various search engines and regularly updating them to keep them highly visible. This means close monitoring of your site’s analytics to determine how many visitors access your website, the pages they visit, and how long they remain on your site.

Like your website design plan and the content your firm uses on its pages, its blog, and its social media channels, your lawyer SEO strategy is customized to your firm’s brand and its goals.

The first step in a law firm SEO campaign with LawSudo is an evaluation of what you currently have. Your domain name plays a role in your website’s SEO strategy and if your site uses a domain name that’s not ideal for SEO we might suggest purchasing a better domain name and moving the site there. We also look at the coding of your website to determine whether there are internal areas where your SEO can be improved. Issues we look for include slow load times, crawlability, and whether there are discrepancies between your mobile and desktop versions of the site. Finally, we determine if you are currently using any SEO techniques that could cause your website to be penalized. It is possible that you are using them inadvertently or if you’ve worked with a lawyer SEO strategist in the past, he or she used black hat techniques to boost your site’s visibility. We might even find outdated lawyer SEO techniques in use, which are at best irrelevant, and at worst can cause your website to face a penalty.

Our team also looks at other firms in your city and practice area to determine where you stand among your competition. If other firms are showing up on the first page of Google when we search for your firm’s keywords, we assess why they’re ranking better than your firm and develop a strategy to surpass them in Google’s index. Lawyer SEO is all about strategy – the strategy that works for your firm won’t necessarily be a strategy that works for another firm.

SEO vs. PPC: Which One Should my Law Firm Use?

Search engine optimization is one way to increase your firm’s visibility and encourage conversions. Another is pay-per-click marketing (PPC) for lawyers. With PPC, your firm essentially buys listings in search engines and on websites your target audience visits. Every time a visitor clicks on your firm’s link, you pay the search engine or website your previously agreed-upon rate. This way, your firm pays only for the clicks that users make on its listing. It’s a different approach to search engine visibility than SEO that comes with its own benefits and drawbacks.

During our initial analysis of your firm’s current marketing and SEO efforts, our lawyer SEO team will determine whether PPC is a better fit for your firm than SEO or if it would benefit from a multi-pronged approach that includes both SEO and PPC. The right solution depends on your firm’s overall marketing goals. Any firm looking to build a long-term online marketing strategy should absolutely utilize SEO. For firms that work in very specialized niches and those seeking quick results, PPC might also factor into their marketing strategies. Whether your competitors are using PPC or not might also influence whether we feel it would be wise for your firm to consider PPC.

Contact LawSudo today to speak with one of our lawyer SEO experts about the services we offer. Our team is here to answer any questions you have and help you make marketing decisions that will benefit your firm.

How Long Does Lawyer SEO Take to Generate Leads and Conversions?

We’ve mentioned a few times that SEO is a long-term game. But how long, exactly, should you expect to wait to see results from your lawyer SEO campaign?

Typically, lawyer SEO strategies take four to six months to start generating results. This is only the beginning, though. Your website should have more visitors eight months after implementing SEO strategies than it had six months after implementing them, and a year after implementing lawyer SEO strategies, your site should have even more viewers than it had at the eight-month mark. In the beginning, there is a lot of trial and error. We might determine that certain keywords should be swapped for others or that visitors respond more to one type of content than another.

Attorney SEO

Then, there is the issue of creating content for your attorney SEO strategy. Content is one of the most important parts of your firm’s online marketing effort, and this includes its ability to act as the vessel for your attorney SEO strategies. The content on your firm’s website might include any or all of the following:

• Landing pages
• Content pages
• Blog posts
• Videos
• Social media content
• Newsletters
• Infographics

Without content, your firm cannot do legal content marketing. Content marketing is the use of unique content to encourage conversions by building readers’ loyalty, educating them about your practice areas, and demonstrating the value of working with your firm. All of the above types of content marketing can be part of an attorney SEO strategy. Content marketing is a way to promote your firm without directly “selling it” to your readers. Instead of pushing for a sale, content informs readers. Shorter types of content, like videos and tweets, deliver bite-sized pieces of information while longer types of content, such as newsletters, provide comprehensive overviews of relevant topics.

Can Google Trust your Website? This is Important to Attorney SEO

It might sound silly, but you need to prove to Google and other search engines that your website is “trustworthy.” Good attorney SEO does this. The more Google trusts a site, the higher it ranks. Google considers the following when determining a website’s trustworthiness:

• How viewers engage with your site’s content
• How many pages the average viewer visits on your website
• How long the average user spends on each page
• The consistency of the information on your site’s pages
• How quickly your pages load – on mobile and on desktop
• The level of trust it has in the sites that you’re linked with

Like in a human relationship, it takes time for Google to develop trust in your website. Be willing to be patient – Attorney SEO takes time and in many cases, requires that we try a few different strategies to find the one that works best.

Developing a Long Term Attorney SEO Plan for your Firm

At LawSudo, we’re committed to helping your firm develop an attorney SEO strategy that will continue to benefit your firm for years to come. An attorney SEO strategy requires ongoing maintenance. Search engines’ continual updating of their algorithms and rules is one reason behind this, but not the only reason. Another reason is the sheer competitiveness of the attorney SEO sphere – Attorney SEO is one of the most competitive verticals in the world of SEO. Because of this, firms are constantly innovating their attorney SEO strategies. To stay competitive, your firm has to be committed to constantly updating and improving its approach to SEO. Don’t let your firm’s outdated or ineffective SEO strategies weigh it down.

How Much Can I Expect to Pay for Attorney SEO?

An effective attorney SEO strategy is an investment. When you are evaluating an attorney SEO firm, don’t just think about the upfront cost of hiring the firm. Think about the return that you will receive on your investment and the value of the larger package you purchase. There is a large variation in the amount of money law firms spend on online marketing. Firms can spend anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 on internet marketing, and larger firms are known to spend even more than that. SEO is a rapidly growing industry; in 2015, American companies spent more than $60 billion on SEO services. That figure is expected to surpass $70 billion by 2018.

How much you’ll spend on your firm’s attorney SEO plan depends on a few factors. One of these is whether you want a pure SEO plan, a plan that includes SEO and PPC, or a plan that is strictly PPC. Attorney SEO costs more than PPC because of the time, research, and expertise involved in creating an SEO plan that works. Building a strong attorney SEO campaign requires the following:

• Link building campaigns. This involves regular research of high-quality sites from which your firm’s website would benefit linking, followed by the development of relationships with those sites to create link-worthy content and place links;
• Amplification of that content and social sharing, which could require seeking influencers to share the content;
• Analysis of your website’s traffic, the search engine spiders indexing the site, and your site’s structure and URL to determine where attorney SEO efforts are succeeding and where they are failing; and
• Speed testing. Loading too slowly can hurt your website’s SEO ranking. Creating a site that loads quickly is a part of attorney SEO that can easily be overlooked.

During your initial consultation with one of the attorney SEO experts at LawSudo, we will discuss your firm’s needs to determine an appropriate price quote for this another online marketing services we provide. We can show you results from attorney SEO campaigns we’ve developed for clients in the past to demonstrate how we apply our understanding of modern SEO practices to get results.

Contact LawSudo to Develop an Attorney SEO Strategy that will Work for your Firm

An effective law firm SEO strategy for your firm is as unique as your lawyers and your firm’s brand. Work with a team of attorney SEO strategists who can build, implement, and maintain the strategy that will bring your firm to the front page of each search engine and, if you choose to make PPC part of your online marketing plan, to the websites that your target audience frequents. Don’t wait to get started with LawSudo. Contact us today to schedule your initial consultation with a member of our team, during which we will go over all aspects of attorney SEO and other parts of an online marketing plan with you. We will answer any questions you have about attorney SEO and by the end of the conversation, you will be confident in your decision about the next steps in your firm’s online marketing strategy.