All successful law firm SEO campaigns begin with research. If you are working with a seasoned law firm marketing company, the up-front research is not as extensive as it would be with a firm that had talent but no experience or expertise working with law firms.
Know Thyself - Internal Audit
If you have an existing website that is failing to gain any SEO traction, paying for an audit prior to any further commitment is a wise decision.
First, it shows you the depth of technical expertise of your choice of SEO experts before signing any longer-term commitments. It can give you more peace of mind prior to making a longer-term commitment, and it can also help raise any red flags.
If an SEO provider can’t provide much of a reason why you aren’t ranking well (or tell you where you are ranking and why), then they aren’t worth it and you should move on.
Secondly, it gives you a realistic understanding of why you aren’t succeeding. My advice: don’t take any negative news personally. Perhaps you personally signed off on the expenses going into your existing site, and you anticipated it would reap a ton of benefits. Live and learn, but do the diligence prior to your next step.
Keyword Research
This step is less complicated for an experienced law firm SEO agency like Intrepid.Marketing, but we still don’t take anything for granted. Every campaign has to have its keyword list. We establish primary keywords and secondary keywords.
First, we have to look at your practice areas. There can be what practice areas you currently work on, but then there are the practice areas that you want to improve through SEO. How do you see your firm growing over the next 10 years? If you want a little bit of everything, then your SEO strategy will either be diluted by a broad focus or far more expensive by the need to produce a high volume of work across a broad range of keywords.
Either way, this step establishes your set keyword list. This list and its ranking performance will be the basis of evaluating longer-term performance.
Competitor Research
Competitor research is the final step and absolute cornerstone of creating an SEO campaign strategy.
Remember, our high-level vision of the best law firm SEO is the strategy to be the best. You can define this relative to your competition. What are they doing to achieve page one rankings? Do they have a professional, well-developed website with X total pages producing Y total new pages per quarter? Do you need a specific strategy to overtake a competitor over the long-run? Or do you need to break out and establish dominance with a strategy to produce higher quality instead of quantity banking? Sometimes you don’t have to beat competitors at their own game; you can change the rules.
Ultimately, competitor research will form the basis of your strategy. If you go into an SEO campaign without it, you are only guaranteed one thing: you’re going to be spending money on SEO.
Our Methods and How We’re Different
Intrepid.Marketing does its own competitor research into the final phase of pricing out our contracts, because we have the industry’s only money-back guarantee. We want to make smart choices and price accordingly.
Other companies deliver very specific scopes of work. If that scope of work turns out to not be enough -- after all they wanted to sign a contract at the largest value you would agree to, not necessarily at the level you needed -- then they will up-sell you. This is the infamous nickel and diming. If you signed with one of the big-box legal brands that offers websites and SEO as one of their many offerings, you might even find out that you don’t own your website. They apply even more pressure for up-selling you. Either way, if you want to get control over your own website, they’ll at a minimum charge you for “their property” that you were “leasing” from them at a monthly fee.
We don’t lock you in to a scope of work at a price level -- if we have to double our efforts to make our guaranteed page one rankings, we’ll do it for you, without nickel and diming you for increased fees.
When you go into a long-term campaign with us, you don’t have to question what the long-term costs are. They will be known and set up-front. If we have to do more to beat your competition, then we will. Because we’re ultimately about creating success and a return on your investment.
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If you’d like to schedule a FREE consultation with a law firm SEO expert, shoot us an email using our online contact form, and I will personally reach out to you as soon as possible.