I remember working at the downtown Chicago law firm of Foran and Schultz and I was in charge of the firms web site, as well as the firms computer network.  Web design was a new thing and it was pretty cool putting up the firms first site, but I was more excited by the fact that the site could also be found at search engines like Alta Vista, Hotbot and good old Yahoo! Google wasnt even in the picture back then, but they were coming!

I remember telling the lawyers at the firm that it was an important thing to be found at search engines, they werent so sure and told me not to put in any more overtime on what I called Search engine site optimization! They were wrong because as we all know now, having your site listed at Google in the top spots can make a real difference in getting new clients.

There is more to do in todays age then just organic SEO, now theres pay per click marketing, videos, facebook, twitter, linked in, blogs and the list goes on.  Yet its always going to be key to make sure your site is coming up at the top of the search engines for your most important terms.

WE GET GREAT RESULTS

Getting top search engine rankings involve many things.  There is no one single thing to do, you have to do a lot of things over time. Its all about having a good domain name combined with great solid content and a solid social media and link campaign.   Most lawyers would never have the time to do all of this, so it makes sense to have an expert do it all.

If your law firm is looking for assistance with their overall Internet marketing strategy, call us at 630-393-0460.

You MUST be patient with Google, especially when you have a new website. Some lawyers think you can just put up a site and get listed in the top 10 for competitve keywords within months, that is just not true. 

It can usually take 6 months or longer in order to get good results and thats only if your site is fully optimized, has solid content, is search engine friendly and you get links to your site from other well ranked sites and directories.

Even then it can take some time to crack the top 10 but if you keep creating good content and are patient, it can really pay off with top 10 rankings for keywords that would cost you $1-10 per click at the pay per click search engines.

If you dont have the patience to wait, then you can always do pay per click marketing as well, and thats usually a good idea when first launching a website.   You can also buy links from other sites and this can speed up the time it takes to get well ranked but in the long run, the key is creating new content that focuses on your main keywords and getting links from other sites. 

Its key to have someone monitor and maintain your site if your serious about getting top 10 organic results.

Organic search engine positions on the other hand are free!  They are the gift that keep on giving and if you have one of the top 10 or 20 positons, you will get a nice flow of traffic from people that are interested in your legal services.    The organic results are the ones on the left side of the page and people tend to trust organic results more then paid results, because anyone can buy their way to the top but with organic results, you have to earn your way to the top!

EXAMPLE OF ORGANIC SEARCH ENGINE SUCCESS

I have a legal client that does both organic optimization and pay per click marketing. Here is an example of how valuable organic results are for a law firm versus pay per click results.  This firm was doing a lot of PPC marketing for bankruptcy related keywords but stopped doing it because of how high the cost was.   The cost for the term chicago bankruptcy lawyer at Google adwords is an average of $12.62 per click for a top 3 position.  Same thing for most chicago bankruptcy terms, in the $10-15 per click range.

Luckily for this client, we have been developing thier organic presense for the past few years and we not only optimized the firms main site, but we created a legal mini site for the chicago bankruptcy law practice.  So the firm has a very strong organic presence at Google and other search engines. At Google for the term chicago bankruptcy law the mini site is ranked #1 and the main site is ranked #6. So TWO top 10 listings for a competitive and very expensive keyword.  If they were paying per click and got just 20 clicks per site, it would cost more then $400 just for 40 total clicks on one keyword.

The firm gets much more then 20 clicks and are top 10 for many other keywords in the organic listings at Google.  The senior partner told me the other day that they are getting about 2-3 referrals a week for bankruptcy work and its all coming from the organic listings because they stopped the pay per click campaigns for those keywords.  So they are saving huge money on the clicks and the traffic from the organic results are resulting in new business.

Pay per click marketing is a great idea but in the long run, you must have good organic listings or your going to pay much more overall for your online advertising. We can assist your law firm with building its organic search engine presense, contact us today.

When you have a national focus versus just a local focus, then you have a lot of additional keywords to focus on, and usually you have a lot more competition.   It can take additional work in order to achieve top rankings, usually it means creating more pages within the site and mainly getting quality links from other sites. 

Good post from Andy Beal about how most traffic to your blog will come from the search engines, BUT that its not enough, you must provide quality content relevant to what people are seeking for your blog to really flourish.

***  Mixed blessings for SEM come from a Boston University study entitled Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in the Blogosphere.

First, the good news: the majority of blog traffic comes from search engines. Search engines accounted for 43% of referral traffic in the blogosphere. Hurray for search engine marketers! Their diagram of referral traffic (below) does not include the 28% of blogosphere traffic without any referral data (probably bookmark or type-in traffic).

Now for the bad news: “Despite the intimacy between traffic and search, however, optimizing a blog for search engine algorithms does not win the blogs retention or popularity,” as MarketingVOX put it. Yep, all the rankings in the world don’t make your blog well read, popular or sticky. You have to do that.

SOURCE:  Marketing Pilgrim

This way you get the most exposure on the search engine page. When you have your firm listed in the organic listings on the left side and then also the sponsored listings on the right side, it gives you a better chance of someone clicking on your site and finding your firm.

An example of a law firm that has dual exposure at Google is The Law Offices of Don Thompson. If you type in the search of Chicago Probate at Google, his site comes up #1 in the organic listings on the left side, then the same site comes up on the right side under "sponsored listings".   

Sometimes it might not make as much as sense to bid on keywords that are very expensive, especially if your already coming up in the free organic listings but if the pay per click keyword is less then 50 cents per click, then I would suggest it.

Getting listed in the PPC engines is easy, the real trick is getting your law firms site in the top 10 in the organic listings.  We have helped many lawyers achieve this and as a result they have gotten new business and many new clients.  Contact us if we can help your law firm succeed on the Internet.

Many law firms don’t bother ever updating the firms web site and I see a lot of legal sites that are pretty stale and out of date.  The search engines favor web sites that add or update content on a regular basis and it also helps to give your a site a fresh look from time to time for your viewers.

IS YOUR SITE SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY?

Another reason to consider updating your legal site is because many web sites that were created 3-4 years ago were not built with the search engines in mind. I see a lot of sites that have all graphic home pages, very little content, no site map page and other things that can effect getting the best possible search engine rankings for your law firms web site.

LEGAL WEB SITE FACE LIFT

My legal marketing and design company Lawyers Court recently updated the legal web site of Law Firm Consultant Robert Henderson of RJH Consulting. This site had not been updated in over 4 years and needed a fresh new look, as well as an updated navigation structure, a site map page and additional content.

CONTENT IS KING

We created a simple new design with an updated logo and a few new legal images but the key updates were the additional content provided by including 10 legal consulting related articles. This gave the site an additional 10 pages, all of which have been optimized for the search engines.

OTHER KEY ADDITIONS TO THE UPDATED LEGAL WEB SITE

A few other things that we did, that all law firm web sites should have is #1- Your firms contact info including email should be on every page, #2- The site should have a dual navigation structure, meaning links at the top of every page and then text links at the bottom of every page, #3-Adding additional content to the home page and then #4 is having a site map page to make sure that the search engines can find all the pages within the site.

So now this legal web site is what I would call "Search Engine Friendly" and its come a long way for a very reasonable price.

Contact us if you would like a legal web site face lift for your law firm or legal web site.

Much discussion here about how search engine optimization has helped about.com. Much discussion about how SEO has helped About in driving traffic in this Online Journalism Review article, About.com CEO explains why NYT spent $410 million to buy site.

Organic search engine rankings are very valuable and are like the gifts that keep on giving. It takes a lot of time and dedication to achieve good organic listings but usually you keep them and that results in a steady flow of traffic going to your site.

Many lawyers are confused by the difference between the pay per click sponsored listings and the free organic listings at Google, Yahoo and other top search engines.

The free or "organic" search listings at Google are listed on the left side of the page and the sponsored PPC listings are located on the right side of the page under "sponsored links" and sometimes at the very top of the page, right above the organic listings.

Organic listings take time and effort to achieve and are usually a result of a legal web site that has a lot of good content, is listed in the Yahoo and Open directories and has a lot of links pointing to it from other sites.

The pay per click or sponsored listings are a result of web sites that bid a certain amount per click on a keyword. The higher the bid, the higher the ranking. Even though at Google its a little bit of a different bidding process then at Overture. At Overture, its simply a matter of whoever bids higher, gets the higher listing, where at Google, its a combination of different criteria including amount bid.

Obviously you want to be listed in the organic listings because its like the gift that keeps on giving and you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks on your site.  Yet it takes time to get the free listings and sometimes you have no choice but to pay extra to visitors to your legal web site. Some lawyers do both, get great organic listings but then also pay for the sponsored links to cover all bases.