When it comes to how to choose the best SEO company for lawyers, there’s no single solution. You need to find a specialist. You need someone with experience. You’ll need to form a professional relationship that helps your business grow.
That’s all easier said than done, of course. In this article, we’ll look at some of the finer points of choosing the best SEO company for your law firm’s website. We’ll talk about the following points:
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The rest of the post will go into detail on these tips for finding an SEO firm. Feel free to contact us at any point for a consultation. Please call us at 888-590-9687 or send us a message via our website to get started.
Speaking of numbers, SEO is a numbers business. You need cold, hard data to plan your strategy.
Luckily, these data are widely available from multiple sources. You can (and should) even collect it yourself based on the visitors to your page — how they act, what they view, and through which methods they decide to contact you.
So the info’s out there. But what happens when you use the lowest common denominator to guide your efforts? What happens when you use generalizations instead of specifics? You guessed it: sub-par results.
This is exactly why you need an online marketing firm for lawyers. Not only do we know the business of practicing law, but we also have specific, proprietary data sets that give us insights into how to optimize your website for search engines. We know how your best potential clients behave online, and we have the numbers to back that knowledge up.
You’ll also want to look beyond the numbers when shopping around for online marketing companies.
Statistics are great. They help immensely when making SEO decisions. However, you also need experience.
Marketing firms can buy data sets online. This is great in the right hands — it provides critical context and jump-starts strategies.
As you probably already know, there’s more to marketing than downloading some datasets. Marketers have to use their judgment along with the information. In short: Don’t presume that legal focus equates to on-the-ground experience.
Ideally, you’ll want someone who has worked with other firms in your practice area and/or your territory. In general — even aside from the unique style of the lawyers — a divorce law firm will usually need to take a different approach than a personal injury attorney or an estate planner.
As an SEO firm for law offices nationwide, we understand the subtleties of the profession. We also have clients across the country, putting us in an excellent position to speak directly to local markets.
Here’s something that many people overlook: compatibility. For example, think about how your relationships with your clients can affect your cases.
When you’re able to get along, it’s usually easier for your clients to trust you and let you do your job. The same will be true for the relationship between you and whichever marketing company you choose — except in reverse, of course. You’re the client this time.
It’s not always easy to predict which law firm SEO companies will be easy to work with. Some of it usually comes down to a gut reaction.
If you’re more analytical, try asking yourself some questions. Was it easy to contact the company? Did you like their website? How did the consultation go? Do they have the services your business will need as it grows? These initial interactions tend to set the tone for the whole working relationship. If it went well, you might have found a match.
If you’re looking for help with SEO for a law firm, you probably already know that it is a relatively technical subject. Naturally, there are SEO certifications.
Various types of organizations offer these certifications. Some are for individual professionals and others apply to entire companies. For example, Forward Lawyer Marketing is a Google partner. This credential indicates that we are up-to-date on the latest Google SEO technology. We have to recertify regularly to maintain the title.
If you’d like more information about our technical and SEO certifications, please reach out. We have in-house experts in a variety of fields. We also have specialists for SEO-related services, such as video production, web design, and blog writing.
This suggestion isn’t going to work for everyone — learn a bit about SEO. Yes: You’re probably hiring someone precisely because you do not want to do online marketing yourself. However, learning a few of the basics should help you feel more confident that you are making the right choice for your firm.
To that end, we’d suggest learning some terms. Here’s a quick and very basic glossary, in no particular order:
SEO is a medium- to long-term strategic service. Some firms see results very quickly with the right techniques, but the timeline is still weeks or months rather than days.
Getting higher ranks on search engines should lead to more interest from potential clients. It should lead to more business for your firm. As you get busier, will your SEO expert have all the tools you need to make the most of your success?
FORWARD Lawyer Marketing is a full-service law firm marketing and advertising company. We have SEO experts on permanent staff and in leadership positions. However, that’s only one part of what we do. We would recommend that you look for a company like ours that can grow with you — it will save you the time and effort of having to shop around again in a few months.
“Bluster” might be a harsh word, but it’s a simple fact that most marketers can talk up a storm. It’s a huge advantage in the profession — especially since much of what we do is get to know people and create messages.
There’s another side to the gift of gab. It goes back to a couple of the points we talked about earlier: experience and legal industry focus.
You can’t just talk the talk. You have to walk the walk. In other words, knowing SEO techniques is only beneficial if you also know how to use them to develop a business.
SEO is only one part of the puzzle. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we have a track record of success with law firms across the country to back up our claims. Feel free to contact us directly for some of our case studies or, alternatively, you can find some of them online.
When you’re expanding a business, especially at the early stages, cost is a major consideration. It’s not the only consideration.
With lawyer marketing, you get what you pay for. It takes hours of work, years of experience, and a diverse team to really tackle SEO, even for a single attorney practice. You have to research keywords, write articles, establish link structure, review technical website details, rewrite markup, and monitor your progress, among other things.
If the price doesn’t seem to cover all of that, you might not be getting the SEO service you deserve. The legal profession is competitive online — accept a bid that will help you compete.
Most SEO efforts at law firms start out as do-it-yourself endeavors. Sometimes, a lawyer or staff member has been writing a blog. That’s not ideal, but it’s certainly easy to understand how it might seem efficient.
Unfortunately, many attorneys choose to hire tech generalists, friends, or family members as SEO contractors for their law offices. You might have even done this yourself.
We can typically spot this from a mile away. When we start our initial analysis, what we usually find is the website full of pages that could and should be performing much better on search. One of the first things we do is rewrite these pages, but that is far from efficient. Our suggestion is to just go with a specialized professional in the first place.
At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing we believe in taking a “leave no stone unturned” approach when it comes to our legal clients. With that in mind, we employ extremely experienced people in the industry. Our SEO Director has been marketing online for well over two decades and oversees all SEO tasks including editing content and performing on-page optimization as well as internal and external linking. Our specialty is law firm marketing and SEO for lawyers. We are here to make your website perform as well as it possibly can on search engines. To get started talking about your business goals and how we can help, please give us a call at 888-590-9687.