Law Firm Internet Marketing - How to Boost Your Online Visibility

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by Brandon Cornett

Every lawyer wants his or her website to rank well in the search engines — and with so many consumers conducting legal research online, it's easy to understand why. Search engine visibility can increase the amount of qualified traffic to a lawyer or law firm's website, and this has a direct and positive impact on client acquisition.

Many lawyers today realize these benefits of search engine visibility, so they strive to make their websites more visible to search engines (a process known as search engine optimization, or SEO). But with so much SEO information (and misinformation) swirling around, it can be hard to decide what actions to take for best results.

My goal with this article is to put some of this confusion to rest. I will do so by offering the tried-and-true strategies I constantly rely on for website visibility. These strategies have worked for me time and time again, so I have every confidence they will work for you as well.

Here are six ways to boost the online visibility of your law website.

1. Add 10 Pages of Content to Your Website

Adding informative content to your website is an easy, low-cost way to increase your search engine visibility. Content, after all, is the building block of SEO. In order to come up in search results for certain key phrases, you need to develop content around those phrases.

Don't be overwhelmed by this task. Adding pages of content to your law firm's website is easier than you might think. Take this article, for example. I could easily expand the six items in this article to make a web page out of each one (if it benefited my readers). This would give me six new pages of keyword-rich content to educate my readers and "feed" the search engines. You could also implement this strategy by creating a legal glossary or Q&A section of your law firm's website.

2. Acquire Inbound Links

An inbound link is simply a link from another website to yours. Most of the major search engines (and Google in particular) use "link popularity" as part of their ranking algorithms. In other words, they evaluate the quantity, quality and relevance of inbound links from other sites to yours as one of many ranking criteria.

The practice of seeking and acquiring inbound links is known as link building. Increasing the number of websites that link to your law firm's website will help you improve your ranking (and by extension, increase the amount of traffic you get).

3. Start a Law Blog

A lawyer blog can help not only your search engine ranking, but also your online success in general. Blogging on a regular basis helps you grow your website, acquire those inbound links we mentioned above, build your reputation, inform your readers and, of course, increase your online visibility.

4. Add Your Law Firm Website to Online Directories

A web directory is basically a big catalog of websites, arranged by categories and sub-categories. Directories can benefit you in several ways. First, they give you another way to obtain the inbound links mentioned previously. They can also lead to direct traffic, if people find your website through the directory itself. Lastly, being listed in several high-quality directories can act as a "vote of confidence" for better search engine ranking.

Google, for instance, uses directory inclusion as part of its website-ranking algorithm. If a website is listed in major directories such as Microsoft's Small Business Directory, that website can score more "points" with a search engine like Google.

When you think about it, it's perfectly logical. Being included in a directory is a vote of confidence. It means a human editor (not a robotic crawler) has reviewed the website before adding it to the directory. This tells the search engine that the website has some degree of quality, legitimacy and relevance.

Here's the important thing to remember about directory listings. Like everything else in life, there are good directories and bad ones. When weighing the cost of a directory submission, consider such factors as the directory's age, ranking, and the number of listings / links they put on each page (a good directory will include no more than 20 - 25 listings per page).

5. Publish an Online Press Release

Do you have news related to your law firm? Why not publish it online for direct traffic and SEO benefits? You can publish a nationwide press release online for about $100. Even better you can include keyword-rich hyperlinks back to your website, within the body of the press release. Remember, links to your website with key phrases in them can boost your search engine ranking.

I use and recommend PRWeb.com. It costs $80 to $120 per release, depending on what kind of distribution upgrades you choose. PRleap.com is another good service. With either service, your press release will probably end up in Yahoo News and Google News as well, which is great for direct exposure to your key audience.

6. Make Your Website a "Must Read"

Earlier in this article, I mentioned the importance of inbound links (to your website from other websites). One of the best ways to support this is by having a website worth linking to in the first place. "Link worthy" websites come in a variety of forms, but they all have one thing in common. They all offer content that gets people's attention. They are unique, interesting, useful and informative.

If you create the kind of law website that makes other in your industry or niche say, "Wow, that's quite a resource! I'd like to share that with some folks," then your link-building efforts will be a breeze. You'll get unsolicited links without even asking for them. Over time, this will give you a huge advantage in terms of search engine visibility and website traffic.

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