Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for law firms can be a powerful means of generating new case leads and growing your firm. Many, however, struggle to understand what SEO is, and they are left wondering what tactics and strategies are needed to make real money with SEO.
At first, avoid the desire to get into the weeds on what tricks to try. This misses a much bigger picture that is fundamental to success.
Look At This From Google’s Perspective
Alphabet Inc (GOOG), Google’s parent company, is eyeballing a market capitalization of $1 trillion. GOOG isn’t positioned in the FAANG group of tech stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), because of Android phones. Google is a titan because the world trusts the results Google’s algorithm returns when they search.
Google’s algorithms are designed to serve its users with quality, authoritative and relevant content, guided by the user’s “keyword” search phrase.
Once upon a time, you could put your keyword phrases into a meta tag (read: invisible to humans, seen only by machines) and tell Google what keywords were relevant to your site. That stopped being relevant so long ago that I barely have any experience using meta keywords tags.
This is a good thing for Google’s end-users. Its algorithms, not powered by AI machine learning, are smarter than the spammers -- it is only going to provide its users with the best.
The Secret To SEO Success: Be The Best
I always tell prospective clients that the key to SEO is simply to be the best. If you aren’t ranked at the top, you just aren’t ranked at the top yet. If you are objectively the best across a wide range of performance metrics, you’re going to be one of the few in your market that actually succeed with SEO.
Striving to be the best soothes the pain of an ever-changing industry. You couldn’t get a 4-year degree in SEO, because your Freshman course material might be no longer applicable. While some of the details change over time, you’re always going to be okay if striving to be the best.
How do you objectively measure this? Well there are a range of technical metrics that can be used to compare one website to another. While Google doesn’t make its algorithm public, there are hundreds of evaluation points that the SEO world gets to guess at and test their theories.
One aspect that often trips up attorneys: aesthetics.
“Oh I don’t want to change my website, I just had it redesigned, and I like the design.” I have heard this countless times. The sad reply is always “yes, but a machine doesn’t see your aesthetics. It sees that your website is a $65 WordPress theme full of technical problems and a very high page load speed time.” Almost universally, the “sunk cost effect” biases decision makers against further overhauls needed to actually drive new case leads. They keep the good looking website, and all it did for them was cost time and money.
How Google Sees You
When you search Google, you aren’t searching the Internet. You’re searching what Google tells you the Internet is. Google is like a library, and it’s like the difference between searching Amazon for a book and your local library. Your local library curates its selection and is far more limited in its selection than a global retailer
Google’s search results are based on its index of sites it has “crawled.” Automated programs often called crawlers or spiders “crawl” the Internet, going from one link to the next. We click links every day, and they take us from one page to another.
These crawlers are indexing the content and attempting to learn from what it finds.
When someone is searching, Google’s engine is referencing this index and all the countless metrics it has collected to rapidly provide you with the best search results.
Thus the key performance metrics for SEO tend to be technical, not aesthetic. One of my personal advantages throughout my SEO career has been that I set out to be able to build websites from scratch first. Few SEO experts can do this, and they tend to have to work with infrastructure someone else built and make the best with what they have.
My company, however, relies on a custom built framework to provide but another leg up over the competition, because it ticks off quite a few best-in-class performance metrics out of the box for our clients in their market.
n the end, law firms need to grasp Google’s big picture approach to search. It’s too easy to take a deal with any of the countless salesmen that relentlessly hound your receptionist’s phone or email inbox. However, those companies are banking on high volume sales.
Success in SEO is striving to be the best, and law firms need to find a company that can really value that goal, and the high-volume firms aren’t it.
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