SEO has become a huge industry in recent years, and today, most law firms report that they are using some type of search engine optimization strategy.  If you've been having difficulty implementing these strategies and are on a budget, you may be thinking of hiring a cheap SEO service to help you figure out what else you can do to enhance your web traffic.  While not all cheap SEO services are worth the money, hiring the right service can greatly enhance your ability to drive new clicks to your website.  Keep reading to find out how to tell the difference between a cheap SEO service that works and one that doesn't.

Does “Cheap SEO Service” Mean Poor Quality?

It doesn't necessarily have to, but the truth is, you should be very careful about the quality of cheap SEO services.  Remember, those cost savings have to come from somewhere.  Because of this, you should always be skeptical about any cheap SEO service that is offering a much lower price than you've seen advertised anywhere else.

Of course, you may think, if you can get such cheap SEO services, it may be worth the risk—after all, isn't the worst that could happen that your traffic stays the same?  The sad truth is that this isn't even close to the worst that could happen.  If your cheap SEO service decides to use practices that violate Google's terms of service or their quality guidelines, you could actually see steep declines in your traffic.

Where Can a Cheap SEO Service Save Money?

There are places where cheap SEO services can reasonably be expected to conserve some money without having it affect their quality of service too much.  For example, your cheap SEO service probably should avoid paying for any links.  In addition to costing additional money, paid links are usually considered to be low quality links by search engines.

You may also be able to save money by writing a lot of your own content instead of having cheap SEO services draw your content up from scratch.  Even if your cheap SEO service has to edit and rephrase some of the content you've written, this will usually take less time and money—and your words will have what is unmistakably your voice.

Don't Skimp on These Parts of Your SEO Strategy

No matter what, though, there are some parts of search engine optimization that are much tougher for a cheap SEO service to manage.  For example, if you do want original content created for your law firm's website, cheap SEO services may be a really bad idea.

Why?  Because in order to get such inexpensive content, a cheap SEO service is very likely to be using non-native speakers of English who are writing your content from halfway around the world.  Cheap SEO services can't usually afford the rates of professional writers who can make polished, error-free content.  While some types of websites might be able to get away with internationally outsourced content, attorneys are expected to present a very professional image at all times.

Mobile is an increasingly big part of SEO strategy.  If your cheap SEO service hasn't learned much about mobile and isn't planning to help you implement mobile search engine optimization, you should consider looking for a better service.  Great SEO services today are focused on the mobile traffic revolution, which will be responsible for over fifty percent of total web traffic in less than 18 months.

Signs A Cheap SEO Service Isn't Worth It

Cheap SEO services can be very different from one another, but there are some signs that should tell you that your working relationship wouldn't be very productive.  One of these signs should be whether they're aware of new changes to Google and other search engines, and how those changes will affect search engine optimization strategies for 2012 and 2013.

You can also tell that a cheap SEO service isn't worth your time if the people working for the service are unwilling to provide you with case studies showing how their search engine optimization strategies have benefited other law firms like yours.  SEO for law firms is substantially different than SEO in other industries, and it's critical that the cheap SEO services you're looking at know how to get legal clients clicking.

Finally, a cheap SEO service should probably get crossed off your list if they focus their work on creating reciprocal linking.  This “you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” philosophy helped a lot of cheap SEO services create links that got search engine attention, but new algorithm changes have limited how helpful reciprocal linking can be.

Monitoring the Progress of Your Cheap SEO Service

When you hire cheap SEO services to handle your search engine optimization account, you should have a regular schedule for updates.  Your cheap SEO service can help you understand the data that has been gathered by your website for the purpose of analysis, and what the trends in those data are saying now.

If you're not happy with how much progress cheap SEO services are making after several months have passed, you may want an analytics professional to take a look at your website's data.  The analytics pro can tell you whether what's failing you is your content itself or your search engine optimization strategies.

Is Doing It Yourself Better?

With some cheap SEO services having definite negatives, you may be wondering if you should just buckle down and study on your own.  While this may seem like a good idea initially, even a cheap SEO service is putting a great deal of time into research into techniques.  Keep in mind that any time you're spending (or having an employee spend) looking into SEO is time that isn't being spent attending to other firm business.

Doing it yourself should usually only be attempted if you haven't been able to find a cheap SEO service that meets your needs.  You should also have a strong background in computers or statistical analysis (and preferably both) before you start handling all of your search engine optimization needs.

When you outsource search engine optimization, you want the best SEO service you can afford.  But how can you tell if a particular SEO service is great—or whether they're just pretending to be?  Here, we'll take a look at some different indicators that you might see when you look into the best SEO services.  You'll find out whether these indicators add up to say that the service you're using is the best SEO service available, or whether you should consider looking for different services.

SEO Service Good Sign #1: Quality Links Over Quantity

The best SEO services today know that great links are more important than just having an abundance of links all over the internet.  Quality links are much more likely to help your website rise in its search engine rankings.

What's more, a single quality link can organically generate several other links when people see your website and re-link it.  The best SEO services today will never just generate inbound links to your website by posting them on spam pages full of other links (also known as “link farms”).  The best SEO service also won't just join link networks so that you can have a larger quantity of links.

Instead, the best SEO service will help you to create relationships with other bloggers, local directories, and even local news media so that you can use quality link building techniques.  The best SEO services will always build your links organically—that is, they won't pay for the results they're getting, but rather will get them from having good content.

SEO Service Red Flag #1: Lazy Link Building

It's an old saying that what's right isn't always easy, and that what's easy isn't always right.  This is very true when it comes to the best SEO services.  You know that you're not dealing with the best SEO service when you hear that they can get you onto thousands of websites within just a few days.  Think about what that would actually entail, if those links were actually high quality—and now think how low quality those links would have to be to generate them so fast.

Search algorithm updates mean that the Google of today focuses on links that took hard work.  There's no longer an easy way to simply get links without having to provide real content.  The best SEO services work hard for you, rather than taking the easy way out.

SEO Service Good Sign #2: New Techniques

In the SEO industry, which seems to change almost from day to day—and certainly, sometimes, from week to week—it's important for the best SEO services to keep up to date in their use of search engine optimization techniques.  For example, you may have recently heard of a new technique called latent semantic indexing, or LSI.  If you haven't heard of it, don't worry: the best SEO service you can find already knows exactly what it is.

Under the principles of latent semantic indexing, the best SEO services will use many different variations of a keyword rather than just one or two keyword phrases over and over.  Why does this work?  Because Google now includes similar words to the ones you searched for when you perform a search.  For example, if you look up “houston tx dui attorney,” you'll also get results that include the word “lawyer”—which will be highlighted just as if you had searched for that term.  The best SEO service knows this, and takes advantage of it to produce natural-sounding copy that also reads better to search engine indexers.

Understanding how to use new methodology is one of the things that sets the best SEO services apart from the merely good ones.  The best SEO service should be able to tell you about several new techniques that they are currently evaluating, and several techniques that have already been proven to work.

SEO Service Red Flag #2: Old Solutions

If the agency handling your SEO sounds like they walked out of a search engine optimization guide from 2006, it's time to send them back and get the best SEO service you can.  Keyword stuffing is a long-dead strategy, and none of the best SEO services use it any more.  If your service's keyword density seems really high, it may be time to look for a new one.

Another solution that worked in times past (even for the best SEO services) but no longer is “article marketing.” This, in its most spammy form, meant spamming hundreds or even thousands of websites with identical or near-identical content packed full of keywords, along with links back to your website.  The abuse of article marketing services led to Google changing the way it ranks search results, so the best SEO services don't use anything like article marketing today.

SEO Service Good Sign #3: Slow and Steady

It's crucial for everyone involved with SEO at your law firm to understand that results can sometimes be slow to come.  Even the best SEO service won't be able to get you onto the first page of results in a few days if you're currently on page thirty.  Good search engine optimization takes time, and the best SEO services know it.

What you should see, if you're using the best SEO service you can find, is slow but steady and trackable progress.  If you don't seem to be making progress after some months have elapsed, or if you're backsliding, it's possible that you're using a subpar SEO service.

SEO Service Red Flag #3: Promises Instant Results

It's just about a guarantee: if a service promises to give you a guaranteed amount of traffic or instantly boost your website's search rankings, it's probably lying.  The best SEO service won't promise anything instantly.

These kinds of promises are often signifiers of an agency that is great at self-promotion, but not much else.  You'll want to get the best SEO service for law firms, and that means making sure that whatever service you hire understands the likely pace of the results you'll get.

As more Americans use the internet as part of their daily lives (282 million at the last count), more of them have started learning how to effectively use search engines.  Part of effectively using search engines to effectively search for products and services is using local search terms.  Attorneys, due to the local nature of most law firms, can benefit tremendously from understanding how to use local search SEO.  In this guide, you'll learn seven easy to use local SEO tips.  Each can help your law firm get on the path to local search SEO that actually works to make your SERPs better.

Local SEO Tips #1: Picking Your Keywords

It's a mistake to think that just because your law firm is located in a city, you can't also market to people in the suburbs.  In the same way, if you're located in a rural area or a cluster of smaller towns/cities, you may feel that geographic searches and local search SEO actually hurt, instead of help, your business.

You can fix that feeling by choosing keywords that represent more than just the area where your office is.  You can include the names of several other cities in your webpages, and most local SEO tips will suggest including suburbs or neighborhoods as long as those Google searches are being made.

Local SEO Tips #2: Claim Your Profile

On many local search SEO directory websites, your law firm may already have a listing.  For example, it's very likely that as long as you're listed in the phone book, you'll have already been listed by Yelp and Google+ Local.  However, the automated systems that input these entries are limited.  They will usually only be able to identify the name of your law firm, its location, and its telephone number.

That's where these local SEO tips come in.  By starting an account at these websites, you can claim your profile and begin to work on providing more information through this profile.  This enhances your local search SEO by showing that you are located in the area, and that you are active locally.

These local SEO tips won't just help you to appear sooner when people search for terms relating to your law firm.  They'll also get you new customers, just like an advertisement.  An increasing number of consumers are turning to ratings websites and directories for attorney recommendations.  Local search SEO is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the reasons for making one of these profiles.

Local SEO Tips #3: Check Your Website

What if you've followed all the local SEO tips you can find and nothing seems to be happening in terms of your bottom line?  Have you made sure that you're actually seeing an increase in traffic due to your local search SEO efforts?  If traffic is up but conversions are down, you may need to alter your content accordingly.  Conversion-ready content will include direct calls to action for the consumer, as well as clear and engaging copy that isn't littered with legalese or jargon.

You should also make sure that your website is running fast.  Google now includes this metric to determine, in part, where your pages will be displayed in search results.  If your website is running too slowly, you may be sacrificing search engine results pages just because of some poorly optimized code or a bad hosting provider.

Local SEO Tips #4: Use Google Instant

Have you noticed how when you start to type a search term into Google's search field, Google actually tries to guess what you're searching for?  This is called Google Instant, and it's designed to get better at anticipating web needs based on extensive user data.

By playing with Google Instant, you can find your own local search SEO tips.  How?  Just type in your location and a search term people might use to find your law office, then see what else comes up.  You may also want to include these terms in your local search SEO to get more clients, because apparently people are already searching for those exact terms.

Local SEO Tips #5: Use Local Directories

Asking for a listing from the Chamber of Commerce may sound like an antiquated marketing strategy.  You may be surprised to learn that many local SEO tips suggest taking this exact course of action.  Why?  Because local search SEO depends on being linked not only by other websites, but by other local websites.

When a listing for your website appears on a large number of local directories, you'll show up as a better match for people who are looking for a law firm in your area.  While many directory listing services are no longer worth it, local search SEO still requires local directory use to be truly effective.

Local SEO Tips #6: Update Your Profiles

If your law firm changes names, locations, or focus areas, you need to make sure that your local search SEO has been updated accordingly.  An outdated profile can lead to major SEO trouble.  Make sure that somebody at your law firm has been assigned the responsibility of updating these profiles routinely.  You may also want to consider adding new information along with your updates, like photos of your firm or links to videos.

Local SEO Tips #7: Get Reviews

One of the biggest ways clients today use local searches to find lawyers is by using Avvo.com, Yelp.com, Google+ Local, and other rating and review websites.  It's easy to see why: these websites make it easy to compare past client reviews quickly.  When looking for a lawyer, the vast majority of clients will choose the lawyer with reviews instead of the lawyer without them.

This means that in order to make your presence known with local search SEO, you should be encouraging your clients to leave reviews for you.  Even issuing a call for reviews from clients who are LinkedIn connections or Facebook friends can help you to get the extra edge you need.

Small firms can often feel invisible, especially in markets with thousands of other attorneys competing for clients' business.  The internet can be a great way to level the playing field—if you know how to use it right.  SEO for small business can vault your firm into the top page of search results for searches that bring in real, paying clients.  Using SEO in small business is one of the biggest trends for internet marketing today.  What's more, there are now affordable small business SEO options that can help even lawyers who are just starting out.  This guide will cover all this and more about SEO for small business, so keep reading—you need this information today.

Why Search Still Matters

Not everyone believes that creating SEO for small business strategies is still a useful way to spend time for marketers.  These detractors point to a decline in using SEO in small business marketing plans, and an uptick in the number of clients finding attorneys in ways that don't involve using search engines.

However, those detractors are largely focused on retail industries.  Businesses which emphasize services, like law firms, are still often searched for by consumers and find SEO for small business profitable.  It's still three times more likely that you'll get a new client from a web search than any other way of generating leads.  This means that investing in affordable small business SEO is still a great idea for small firms.

What's more, there are more ways than ever to help propel yourself to the top of the SEO for small business heap.  With so many ways to use SEO in small business strategies, there's almost always at least one way that will appeal to your way of doing things.

How Searches Are Changing

Even though search is still important, to be successful with your SEO for small business, you'll need to know about current trends in web searches.  Searches today are increasingly mobile, and increasingly global.  Not all affordable small business SEO packages take this into account, so you should always make sure that your provider of SEO for small business is aware of these changes.

When searches are more mobile, SEO in small business strategies becomes even more important.  Why?  Because mobile searchers are more impatient and less willing to click through multiple pages of web results.  This means that your SERPS (and therefore, the role of SEO in small business) will be much more important for mobile customers.

It also means that your web pages now need to be optimized for viewing by mobile browsers.  Even if your affordable small business SEO works well and puts you in the top page of search results, it will only help if your website draws them in.  Don't waste time and money on SEO in small business marketing strategy if you're not going to make your website capable of generating conversions from clicks.

Local searches are also becoming more common, especially for people who hire attorneys.  Any affordable small business SEO package you purchase will need to optimize your business's web pages for local search as well as more general search terms.  

Direct Ads vs. SEO In Small Business Techniques

Many law firms currently do most or all of their online marketing through direct pay per click advertising services, like Google AdWords, instead of using SEO for small business.  If that's what you and your competition are doing, this means that there's more room for SEO in small business marketing in your area.

Direct ads do have some advantages over using affordable small business SEO.  For one thing, while SEO for small business can take several months to really become effective at generating new business, ads work right away.

However, for every click made on direct ads, you'll have to pay a (sometimes quite exorbitant) price.  When you use SEO in small business, you'll keep reaping the benefits for months or even years.  SEO for small business costs a little more money upfront but does tend to have larger payoffs over the long term.

Is Affordable Small Business SEO Possible?

When attorneys start trying to use SEO in small business, they're often flummoxed by the countless rules (many contradictory) that are given by different self-appointed SEO “gurus.”  Because of this, they turn to outsourcing their SEO in small business needs.    But affordable small business SEO can seem hard to come by.  Why?  Because good SEO for small business takes time.

You should be wary about affordable small business SEO if you see a price that seems substantially lower than anyone else's for similar services.  Is it because the person who's doing the SEO for small business isn't a native speaker of American English?  Is it because your affordable SEO service is employing a slew of overseas workers?  

It's not worth it to sacrifice quality for affordability when it comes to SEO in small business.  Affordable small business SEO may generate some short term gains, but if any of it is regarded as spam by search engines, you could lose even the SERPs you had before you started.

Prioritizing Your SEO for Small Business Goals

One way to make it easier to find affordable small business SEO is to make sure that you have clear priorities.  This allows you to pay your service for some elements of your search engine optimization, without needing to pay for a complete package that includes many things you don't need.

For example, maybe you're already quite familiar with making your blog search engine optimized, but you have no idea how to bring mobile traffic to your website.  Affordable small business SEO could focus on your mobile-friendly redesign, while letting you handle your blog content completely on your own.

Decide what parts of the search engine optimization process you're comfortable doing, and then do those parts.  This will not only save you a great deal of money with your affordable small business SEO service, but will also make you more comfortable with gradually doing more search engine optimization in-house.

What is SEO marketing going to look like in a few years?  You don't need a crystal ball to look into the future and know that SEO search engine marketing will keep changing.  While a few years ago, many search engine optimized pages looked clunky, over 50 percent of today's online businesses are using seamless organic SEO marketing.  Keep reading this guide to find out how SEO search engine marketing changes have created new techniques you can use every day.

What is SEO Marketing, and What Makes it Organic?

In the early days of the internet, SEO search engine marketing was extremely primitive.  In 2000, organic SEO marketing was basically unheard of, and most business marketing professionals would have asked you “what is SEO marketing?” if you even mentioned the concept.

When people started to get used to the idea of SEO search engine marketing, they were dealing with relatively simple search algorithms.  These simple search algorithms looked, in large part, for keyword density to tell whose results should be on top.

You've probably seen some of the web pages that this kind of SEO search engine marketing was used on.  Far from being organic SEO marketing, they're clunky, with keywords jammed in every which way.

Now that most people in marketing have advanced beyond asking “what is SEO marketing?”, changes are still afoot.  Organic SEO marketing means that your copy looks natural, rather than having ungrammatical keywords crammed so closely together that it becomes barely readable.

Do I Need Paid Ads When I Use Organic SEO Marketing?

Some of the confusion over what is SEO marketing and what it's useful for comes about because there are many different types of advertising and marketing on the web.  While organic SEO marketing is certainly a great technique, it's also a technique that takes finesse.  Some attorneys prefer to skip SEO search engine marketing and rely entirely on direct advertising, usually on search engines.

What is SEO marketing going to do to your paid ads?  Eventually, it can probably replace them.  Because about 80 percent of internet users simply do not click on sidebar search advertisements, you're reaching a much wider audience with organic SEO marketing.  SEO search engine marketing will take a little while to get off the ground, so you may want to continue running ads while you wait for it to work.

What is SEO Marketing Doing For Law Firms Today?

Whether you're a solo practitioner or part of a larger firm, you're probably wondering: what is SEO marketing going to do to impact my bottom line?  The best thing about organic SEO marketing is that it doesn't have to make your website copy look very different to your existing clients.  This type of SEO search engine marketing, because it looks natural, won't risk scaring new potential clients away or hurt your reputation for having good information online.

Of course, just altering copy isn't the only answer to the question “what is SEO marketing.”  Today, because Google now ranks link quality and weights that in deciding where to put your results on the search page, many things fall under the SEO search engine marketing umbrella.  For example, your social networking websites, as well as Youtube and other video sites, can contain examples of organic SEO marketing that will help to bring in new clients from all over the web.

How Do I Segment Audiences With Organic SEO Marketing?

Segmentation is one of the best ways to make sure that your SEO search engine marketing campaign succeeds.  Instead of trying to talk to everyone with the same organic SEO marketing copy, you can adapt your copy and keywords for each type of client that you're trying to target.
 
You can also segment audiences by actually making different websites for each of the areas of expertise at your firm.  While this may initially sound like a lot of work, what is SEO marketing without work?  If it didn't take any effort, every other firm would already be optimized as much as possible.

How Do I Analyze My Organic SEO Marketing?

Even people who have a very good understanding of what is SEO marketing can be stymied by attempts to interpret the results of their marketing campaigns.  Often, the data you get can seem confusing, or there may just be too much of it for you to guess at what it means.  When this happens, it may be a good idea to have a professional consultation with an analytics consultant.

Analytics professionals can help you learn how to interpret your own data and start taking your SEO search engine marketing into your own hands with split tests and constant analysis.  If you don't intend to do this analysis in-house, many of these professionals will do the analytics work for you.  They'll find out what is SEO marketing doing for your firm and reporting the results to you.

Finding More Organic SEO Marketing Resources

One of the best resources to learn more about SEO search engine marketing best practices is actually Google's website.  This a completely free resource, accessible to everyone on the internet.  Because Google is the biggest search engine in the world and decides how to index results, it's by far the most reliable place to start learning how to do SEO to attract new clients.

You can also keep track of websites like this one, as well as blogs about SEO search engine marketing.  When you follow blogs, it's important not to follow out of date information, as this can affect whether or not you will be successful with your SEO.  

If you have any questions, asking them on these blogs can be very helpful—after all, most SEO professionals are more than willing to share their thoughts and keep online discussions going!  SEO professionals with blogs are also likely to help you by pointing you in the right direction toward the specific SEO resource you need to complete your current search engine marketing project.
 

If you're looking for cheap SEO packages, you're in good company: eighty percent of law firms eventually outsource some or all of their search engine optimization work.  In the tough economic climate today, it's always important to save money, and many people look for the most affordable SEO package they can find.  However, just because affordable SEO packages are cheap doesn't mean they'll be worth your time.  How can you know what differentiates cheap SEO packages that work and the ones that don't?  Keep reading to find out.

Why “Pure” Cheap SEO Packages Are No Longer Enough

When law firms used search engine optimization in years past, they often focused exclusively or almost exclusively on the content of their websites.  Optimizing this content to maximize the likelihood that a page would be ranked well was called “pure SEO.”  Some affordable SEO packages today may still use pure SEO, but it would be a mistake to use these cheap SEO packages.

That's because pure SEO doesn't take into account the things that matter just as much or more to Google and other search engine indexers.  For example, if your affordable SEO package doesn't include anything that helps you optimize your website for mobile traffic, what will your law firm do to attract the 20 percent of web users who are now searching mostly on their smartphones?

Affordable SEO Packages: Link Building

A huge aspect of search engine optimization today is link building.  Any affordable SEO packages that don't include at least some work on link building are not worth your time or money.  Link building refers to the process of having other websites link to your site.

You should seek out an affordable SEO package that not only includes link building but also tells you upfront how those links will be built.  Backlinks that come from paid linking programs, reciprocal linking, or spammy, low quality websites will generally be regarded as neutral to negative for your search engine results.  Some cheap SEO packages that say they include link building services use these types of methods, so caveat emptor.

Some of the ways that high quality, affordable SEO packages might help you to link build include finding guest blogging opportunities for you to take advantage of, or building profiles in high quality directories on the web.  This kind of link building will take longer and may lead to having fewer links than if you had used other methods.  However, when your affordable SEO package uses ethical methods, you never have to worry that your SERPs will be negatively impacted by the next search algorithm update.

Affordable SEO Packages: Targeting and Landing Pages

Another way that an affordable SEO package can improve your search engine results is by helping you to direct your keyword-based pay per click advertisements.  These ads can help augment cheap SEO packages by giving you immediate results.  What's more, as part of your affordable SEO package, you can ask to actually see testing done to compare which keywords and copy pay off best.  You can then use that knowledge to refine your search engine optimization copy on all of your web pages.

Landing pages are pages that are specific to one ad and that address a client's keywords very specifically before they enter your main site.  This means that you'll be able to be able to target tiny niche audiences based on their exact interests.  An affordable SEO package can help you make these landing pages.  Most very affordable SEO packages will limit the number of landing pages you can have to a fairly small number—you may have to upgrade to less cheap SEO packages when you want to have more landing pages for more niches.

Affordable SEO Packages: Video

Not all cheap SEO packages include video recordings.  However, if you can find an affordable SEO package that does include video, it's a wise investment in your marketing future.  Some affordable SEO packages actually include many videos, all recorded in the same day or week, which you can then slowly share over the course of several months to a year.

Just because you're buying cheap SEO packages doesn't mean your video should look cheap.  If you see an affordable SEO package but the video looks bad, keep moving.  That's not the kind of impression you want cheap SEO packages to leave on your visitors, is it?  A well-produced video can still be made in the context of an affordable SEO package, and you'll get tremendous conversion rates compared to an amateur video.

Affordable SEO Packages: Content Management

If you already have a great deal of content for your website, cheap SEO packages can help you put it in front of the right eyes.  By search engine optimizing your videos, social networking posts, and blog posts, then putting it online, your affordable SEO package can save you from many hours of work every week.

Content management frees you from many of the administrative responsibilities of running a law firm website and optimizing it.  Even very cheap SEO packages will typically include this service.  If your administrative responsibilities are giving you headaches, an affordable SEO package may be exactly what you need.

Warning: Don't Get Blog Content From Affordable SEO Packages

One thing you should never accept as part of an affordable SEO package is blog writing.  Think about it: attorneys go to school for years to learn the law.  How can cheap SEO packages possibly provide you with real subject matter experts when they blog?  Subject matter experts cost money, and you won't get them with an affordable SEO package.

Instead, work on your blog content yourself, and learn some principles of keyword density, semantic indexing, and so on before you write your entries.  A well-written entry that is only partially keyword optimized will still look much better to potential clients than any entries that are so full of keywords your clients or colleagues can barely read them.

You've tried everything you know about SEO, but it's still not working!  What do you do?  If you're like four out of five American law firms, you contact SEO expert services to help you figure out what to do next.  Expert SEO services can get you out of your current search engine optimization rut and think of new ideas that you haven't yet tried.  Keep reading to find out why hiring SEO expert services may be some of the best money you can spend in your marketing budget.

Why You Need Specialized Expert SEO Services

When you start looking for SEO expert services, you may be very surprised at how many of them have proliferated on the web.  Today, expert SEO services are a multimillion dollar industry with professionals working on search engine optimization around the world.  With so many companies competing for your business, it's important to pick one that specializes in helping attorneys with SEO.

Sure, it's possible that expert SEO services that don't really understand the business model of law firms could lead to positive SEO results. It's also possible that they could fail miserably.  You don't want to risk your firm on untried SEO expert services.  Instead, choose someone who can already show you multiple case studies from law firms of a similar size to yours.

You should also avoid hiring any services that won't agree to a non-compete clause in your area.  Most specialized expert SEO services will only have one client from each geographic area, to avoid conflicts of interest.  You don't want your SEO experts to be working for your biggest competitor and knowing all of your best tactics.

SEO Expert Services for Lawyers: Developing Keyword-Rich Content

When lawyers learn to write in law school, they're taught a very particular style of content.  In much the same way, expert SEO services can help you write the best content for your chosen niche markets using the latest search engine optimization techniques.

Today's SEO expert services won't stuff your copy full of keywords (and if they do, they may not be much of an expert at all).  Instead, they'll make it look polished, professional, and still appealing both to humans and to search engine robots.

Because designing optimized content often means having to include many variations on the same keyword set, hiring expert SEO services is a great way to avoid the mind-numbing tedium of making sure that all of these words are inserted at the correct density.  You can even write your own content, then send it to SEO expert services for editing that will make it more likely to appear high up in Google's search results.

SEO Expert Services for Lawyers: Identifying Niche Markets

Another great use of expert SEO services is finding out which niche markets in your area have not yet been tapped.  By analyzing keyword use in searches made near you, SEO experts can help you branch out your practice in new and exciting directions.

Attorneys who are just starting out may also want to consult with SEO experts to learn some ideas about the niches available to them and which might be best to start with.  Because niche finding is a specialized service, you'll want to look for expert SEO services that have provided niche finding to a broad range of law firm clients in the past.

SEO Expert Services For Lawyers: Sharing Your Content

Even if you're great at writing your own content, on today's web, that's just not enough to stand out.  You'll also need to find ways to share what you've done, and that's where expert SEO services come in.  These services can help you to post your content online through a variety of platforms.

Depending on what your firm needs and what its desired client base is, SEO expert services may recommend a wide range of different websites and offline places to promote your site.  Especially if your clientele tends toward younger people (less than 50), your expert SEO services may discuss ways to more effectively share the content you've made with smartphone and tablet PC users.

SEO Expert Services for Lawyers: Analyzing Campaigns

Unless you have a quantitative background that lets you do some serious number crunching, you may want to leave the math to the experts.  That's why many expert SEO services offer analytics service.  Analytics is the science of understanding not just who's coming to your website and from where, but what those traffic patterns mean.

Trying to guess what's working and what isn't in your campaigns can lead to big mistakes.  Rather than using guesswork, your SEO expert services will use reliable mathematical and statistical methods to figure out where you're going wrong and why.  What's more, expert SEO services can actually design tests on your website to figure out what content and design contributes to the highest conversion rate.

This kind of analysis is best when it's done not just once, but continuously as your website develops new and better content based on the results of testing.  You may not see great results if you abandon your analytics research after a redesign, so keep testing and working with new ideas to find out what works best.

How SEO Expert Services for Lawyers Are Changing

As quality link building becomes a more important part of search engine optimization, expert SEO services have stepped up their game.  No longer the era of the “pure SEO” agency, today's services tend to offer a wide range of services including social media, mobile optimization, and quality link building across many different types of websites.

When you hire SEO expert services today, you'll also have to decide which of those aspects of complete search engine optimization you want to emphasize.  While many agencies can do any type of SEO, they're bound to have their strengths and weaknesses, and you should be prepared to identify those and prioritize what you believe is most important for your firm to improve.

All the best technology forecasters agree: the future of the web is mobile.  Mobile advertising and marketing are changing the way businesses all over the world sell their products and services.  What's more, when people use their mobile devices, they're using the web differently: no longer confined to web browsers, most mobile users now spend more time using internet-connected apps than their mobile browser.  The time is right to change your mobile marketing and advertising strategy.  If you want to learn how, keep reading this guide.

Why Now is the Time to Learn About Apps

Even two years ago, it would have been pretty strange advice to tell a law firm that learning about apps needed to be part of its mobile advertising and marketing strategy.  In that time, however, smartphones have come to dominate the cellular phone market in the United States.  The two main operating systems for these revolutionary mobile devices, iOS and Android, are largely app based and give developers the opportunity to create purpose-built applications for nearly any business.

As apps have become more popular than traditional browsing, it can be a great time to learn how to use a mobile marketing and advertising strategy in other people's apps.  Ad networks allow you to put your mobile advertising and marketing campaigns into display banner ads that will be shown when people are using their apps.

If you're more ambitious, you might want to try a bigger mobile marketing and advertising project: building an app yourself!  The kind of app that will be most effective for your mobile advertising and marketing purposes will be based firmly in your law firm's niche.  Try to figure out how an app could make your typical client's life easier, and then use one of the easy app building programs available online to create it.

How Mobile Advertising and Marketing Networks Work

Not all apps use the same mobile marketing and advertising networks.  If you want to get in front of the best viewers for your ads, you need to ask some questions about any mobile marketing and advertising network you're planning to use.  

You should find out what their demographics look like, and what apps their ads are displayed on.  A mobile advertising and marketing network that primarily advertises on games played by teenagers probably isn't what you're looking for when it comes to your mobile strategy.  Instead, try to focus on the mobile marketing and advertising companies who are putting banner ads on applications used by adults in the age range your law firm caters to.

The New Trends In Mobile Marketing and Advertising: Social/Local

In addition to looking at mobile advertising and marketing in apps, you should consider advertising in the mobile Facebook app by posting “sponsored stories.”  You can target these stories based on demographics, geolocational boundaries, or even by people who already know the people who are your fans and friends.  Because sponsored stories appear directly in people's news feeds, they are already more than ten times more likely to be clicked on than a traditional sidebar Facebook advertisement on the desktop site.

Facebook is just one of several companies that is now offering better opportunities than ever for marketing to people who are very near to your location.  Local ads are very appealing from a mobile advertising and marketing perspective, because it puts ads right in front of the very people who are most likely to be able to act on them immediately.  As mobile marketing and advertising becomes integrated with smartphone GPS, it has finally become possible to target people specifically when they're close to your office right now.

QR Codes

Quick response (or QR) codes are everywhere today.  You've probably noticed them yourself: the little square boxes of black and white static that you can photograph with a smartphone to go to a website.  Using QR codes in your print advertisements can be an easy way to link your mobile website with your print advertising presence.

You might also consider having a QR code as part of a mobile marketing and advertising promotion.  For example, if your mobile advertising and marketing strategies include advertising a free consultation, the QR code could take potential clients to a website with a contact form to claim this consultation.

Mobile Marketing and Advertising Mistakes to Avoid

Because mobile advertising and marketing is still a young field, a lot of people are still making amateur mistakes—don't be one of them.  Make sure that your mobile marketing and advertising consistently directs to a website that has content that is completely readable for mobile viewers.  

Don't forget to leave your phone number off your mobile website, and make sure that the number appears in text form (which becomes clickable for smartphone users).  If your number is a graphic, smartphone users won't be able to click on it and will have a much more difficult time contacting your office for a consultation.

Finding Mobile Marketing and Advertising Tips

It's likely that this won't be the last article you read on mobile advertising and marketing.  You can find a wide range of other mobile marketing and advertising on lawfirms.laws.com or by doing some Google searches.  It's important to find information on mobile advertising and marketing that is relatively recent—because the mobile market is in a state of perpetual change, what works in 2012 might not be what works in 2015.

When you're looking for mobile advertising and marketing tips, take into account the source where the tips are coming from.  Some articles about mobile marketing and advertising are trying to get you to buy a specific piece of software or use a method you can read about in a certain book (which, of course, costs money to buy).  Those kinds of mobile advertising and marketing articles should always make you suspicious.  Only take advice on your mobile marketing and advertising campaigns from sources that don't have a financial stake in your strategy.

Statistics from 2012 show that nearly there are nearly twice as many attorneys graduating from law school as there are new positions.  That's a competitive legal market, and responding to it requires learning what is niche marketing. Whether you're just looking for a niche marketing definition or you really want to know how to use niche marketing for your law firm, keep reading this guide to find out more.  

What is Niche Marketing: a Niche Marketing Definition

When you're first beginning to learn about niche marketing, it's good to start with a basic niche marketing definition.  So, what is niche marketing?  In brief, niche marketing just describes a business that is narrowing down its focus in order to stand out more from a marketing perspective.

Niche marketing has become a huge factor for businesses in the age of web marketing.  While many businesses never really thought about what is niche marketing before, today the niche marketing definition is of great interest to tens of thousands of marketing professionals.

Narrow, Double Narrow, and Triple Narrow Niche Marketing Definition

For law firms, “what is niche marketing” is a question you need to be asking now.  The niche marketing definition has become of critical importance to attorneys in a pressed job market, and in order to have a sufficiently narrow niche marketing effort, you'll probably need to do some brainstorming.

Let's say that you've started as a criminal defense firm.  What is niche marketing going to look like for you?  Well, criminal defense is already a “single narrow” niche.  That means that it's narrower than a “general practice,” in which just attorneys will serve clients with just about any legal need at all.

The double narrow niche marketing definition is when a niche market has been made, well…”niche-ier.”  For example, let's say you took the same criminal defense practice and decided to make it double narrow.  According to this niche marketing definition, a double narrow practice would be a criminal defense practice that only took DUI cases.

Some attorneys, especially those in small to mid sized cities or rural areas, can stop there.  But if you're in a big city, what is niche marketing but a way to set yourself apart from the competition?  You may already have competitors in your double narrow field, so try narrowing your niche marketing definition even further.  Now you can be a DUI defense law firm that specializes in handling cases for Spanish speaking clients.

What is Niche Marketing Doing for Law Firms?

Understanding the niche marketing definition and how to apply it to your own firm can be a lifesaver in today's economic climate.  Niche marketing is especially important if you're planning to start a new firm or have recently begun a new firm and don't yet have a great deal of name recognition or an existing client base.

By understanding what is niche marketing, you get a head start on your competition whenever you advertise on the web.  The majority of the research people do for attorneys today is through search engines.  By applying the niche marketing definition, your website will become narrower and more likely to attract clients who are searching the web the way real clients search—with long keywords including a location and a specialty practice area.

Making Niche Marketing Work For You

Some attorneys are concerned when they hear the niche marketing definition, because they are worried about putting all their proverbial eggs in one basket.  While it's true that overspecialization can cause a niche marketing effort to backfire, nothing about the niche marketing definition says that you're required to have just one niche.

Try having several niches, which may or may not have significant overlap.  This way, even if one of the niche marketing areas you chose isn't a sustainable practice area, your firm can still thrive as long as the other niches are going strong.

You may want to avoid niche marketing if your advertising and marketing strategies are primarily based in the offline world, unless your niche marketing strategy is very specifically geared to attract people in your immediate area.

Expanding Your Niche Marketing

Maybe you've already known what is niche marketing for a long time, and have even successfully inserted yourself into a local niche.  That's great, but what's wonderful about niche marketing online is that you can actually expand these marketing efforts.

No matter what kind of niches you already have, software exists that can help you find new, similar niches.  Each of these niches can be developed into sections of your website, or even fully separate websites, that are search engine optimized to drive traffic to your website.

When you've begun to expand the niche markets you're working with, you'll want to keep track of which ones are generating more client conversions.  This helps you plan further niche marketing efforts and get rid of the campaigns that are persistently less successful than you had hoped.

What is Niche Marketing for the Future?

Niche marketing trends today include developing niches that take into account the current demographics of the United States.  For example, with a large number of people born during the Baby Boom beginning to retire, attorneys who are learning what is niche marketing may want to begin catering to that demographic.

Another niche marketing trend is marketing toward the increasingly mobile consumer.  In addition to making your website friendly for search engines, you need to have niche marketing landing pages that are easily viewable by mobile consumers.  You'll also want to think about mobile advertising options for your website.

You'll also want to look at hyperlocal niche marketing.  What is niche marketing at the hyperlocal level?  Well, advertising specifically to people who live in very small towns or suburbs that are often overlooked by the large firms can be a great way to do niche marketing online.  This can be a great way to pick up a new client base without even having to slightly alter the kind of law you're practicing.