Search engine optimization can play a critical role in your law firm marketing. However, it’s important to understand how the role of SEO. First, let’s take a look at what SEO is not:
- SEO is not advertising.
- SEO is not magic.
- SEO will not make you rich overnight.
- SEO is not about ranking #1.
- SEO is not spam.
Instead, the role of SEO is to provide access to the content you publish through the search channel.
For example, if you have a website and/or blog, the role of SEO is to help visitors find it through search. This may include visitors that are searching for your name, searching for a law firm like yours, or researching a legal problem or issue that they are facing.
While search isn’t the only way that people will “find you” online, it is an important one. And while it can be very difficult and expensive to compete in some search segments, ignoring search, especially the basics of crawling and indexation, is guaranteed to hurt your visibility within search results.
For example, if you block search engines from crawling your site, it won’t show up in search results. If you don’t provide search engines with important semantic information, like title tags, search engines will have a difficult time understanding what your site is about. This will make it difficult for the search engine to determine for which search queries your site is relevant.
To me, the goal of SEO is publishing great search-mindful content and developing creative strategies to get that content in front of people who are ready, willing, and able to consume, link to, share, and publicize it.
Spend 80% of your time on content development, and 20% of your time on getting in front of the right audiences.
If you keep to this breakdown, you will find that SEO has a flywheel effect:
Now picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It’s about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum—mass times velocity—is what will generate superior economic results over time.
Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all your might, and finally you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four turns, five, six. With each turn, it moves faster, and then—at some point, you can’’t say exactly when—you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren’t pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.
By publishing great content and getting it in front of the right audiences, the weight of your SEO flywheel will continue to propel and complement your efforts.
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