Lawyers are smart, talented people and many could possibly do their SEO themselves — but should they? No. No, they should not.
It’s not really about skill, knowledge, or even technical prowess. It’s about making the best decision for your law firm. In this article, we’re going to look at the top ten reasons you need to hand over the online marketing reins to a professional.
A note: This article assumes you already know what SEO is. After all, why would you be trying to do a complex, technical, specialized task yourself if you didn’t know anything about it?
That said, we’re not trying to make you feel bad. Give us a call if you’re not sure what to do next. We’ll talk about what SEO can do for your specific situation and how Forward Lawyer Marketing can help.
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Search engines are on the cutting edge of Internet technology. They use artificial intelligence, advanced algorithms, complex networks of interrelated services — the list goes on.
You do not need to know how all of this works in order to get your law firm’s website to the first page of the Google search results. However, you do need to know how to work within this constantly shifting set of rules.
Keeping up-to-date with changing rules is something that comes naturally to most lawyers. The question is: How many professions do you want to keep up with?
When it comes right down to it, they probably are not enough hours in the day to keep up-to-date with what’s happening with both online marketing and your practice area. It just makes sense to shop your SEO out to someone who focuses on bringing you the latest techniques (read: the techniques that will work).
As if keeping up with changes in Google’s search algorithms wasn’t enough, you will also need to manage your own campaign. SEO is a combination of different techniques and approaches. Especially at the beginning, you need to test multiple tactics, keep track of what is working, and focus on the strongest strategy for your unique market.
If you hire an online marketing company for lawyers, you already have an advantage. Niche companies like Forward Lawyer Marketing have experience and internal data that apply specifically to the legal profession and, most likely, to your practice area. This makes implementation, maintenance, and modification of SEO strategy much more efficient.
If you have an idea of how much time is invested in a typical SEO campaign, then this next point is going to hit especially hard: Bad SEO is just a waste of everyone’s time. Without the proper analytics, strategy, content, and back-end engineering, you are likely to waste months creeping slowly up the search rankings — if you are lucky enough to see any results at all.
SEO takes time to show major results. However, professionals have the experience and insight to analyze early successes and extrapolate the most effective strategies. This allows us to accelerate your rank increase or isolate the strategies that will actually create one.
SEO takes time. That doesn’t mean you should sit around waiting for something that will never happen. Get a pro if you want real progress.
You are in the legal profession. The best way you can serve your clients is to focus on providing them the high-quality legal services they expect.
We get many prospective clients who have been doing their own SEO. Most of the time, it has been an organic process for them of becoming continuously more invested in their web presence. It starts out as a service to the customers and snowballs into a part-time job for them or for their support staff.
At Forward Lawyer Marketing, we provide the marketing team that your business and your clients deserve. We help you climb search-engine ranks while providing a seamless online interface for your clients to contact, learn from, and interact with your firm.
When you first look at it, the information available online for learning about SEO might seem relatively specific and technical. There are publicly available courses that take months to complete, in-depth technical manuals, and much more.
When it comes to search engine optimization for law firms, this is just scratching the surface. The legal profession is intensely competitive online. Just knowing how to use the tools available is certainly no guarantee that you can use them to compete with other firms.
As we mentioned above, niche marketers like us have specific experience and practical data from our history of working with other law firms. We do not typically go around publishing this data or sharing the specifics of our strategies with potential competitors.
No amount of internet research or how-to studying can put a non-professional on a professional’s level. Don’t let the illusion of expertise that comes with completing tutorials distract you from the simple fact: Most of your competitors have experienced, well-informed marketing teams helping them.
How into technology are you, really? Do you love to use analytics portals, run tests, compile reports, and really dive into statistics?
Follow-up question: How patient are you when it comes to slow, opaque technological processes? Do you like checking in daily and tracking small changes over the course of several months, predicting trends, and making minor procedural tweaks?
As we’ve stated throughout this article, SEO takes time. It also takes focused effort throughout the campaign — especially when you’re getting started.
So, maybe you have tech experience. Maybe you’re a software-focused intellectual property lawyer. Maybe you provide expert testimony in computer crime cases based on a dual background in search engine development and criminal law.
Maybe you live and breathe tech and you could do SEO in your sleep. You still shouldn’t.
Simply put, SEO is its own thing. Most high-level practitioners (including Forward Lawyer Marketing) hold credentials and go through a constant recertification process. We’re on mailing lists, we follow blogs, we use SEO tools every day. Your competitors will have people like us working for them, and you should too.
Have you read all of these points, but you’re unconvinced? You might be a dedicated do-it-yourselfer.
That’s great. We actually have quite a few self-made successes as clients. These are entrepreneurs who have made names for themselves in very specific areas of practice. They often want to maintain control over their online persona.
We completely understand. The impulse to be in control can result in some great results, especially if you have the time to dedicate to doing things right.
However, we also know that we’ve been able to deliver results. We have helped these clients catapult their sites up into the top results when they were having trouble getting onto the first page. The reason our relationships work is because we take the time to understand each client and help them succeed in their own unique ways.
What’s the thing only you can do for your firm? We can help you get back to doing it.
Whether you’re a business strategist, researcher, trial attorney, or consultant, chances are that you are not an SEO expert. Every hour you spend trying to climb search engine result rankings is an hour you do not spend focusing on contributing your unique strengths to your firm.
SEO is a core marketing technique. However, for you personally, it is probably little more than a distraction. For us, it’s the basis of our profession — we’re talented, focused, and experienced.
By this point, we hope you don’t feel insulted when we say that, unequivocally, we can do SEO better than you can. Lawyers aren’t SEO experts, and you need an expert to do the job right.
Forward Lawyer Marketing is successful because we have a unique set of techniques, resources, and experience:
Don’t keep waiting for SEO results that will never happen. Call us at (888) 590-9687 to get started building practical, attainable, sustainable success in your online marketing.
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