Proven Techniques for Marketing your Law Firm on Twitter

Twitter Marketing

Marketing with Twitter is easy if you address three simple steps:

1.     Setting up your profile for the best possible Twitter marketing

2.     Interacting with followers to increase and sustain your marketing campaign

3.     Increasing and improving your efforts with proven techniques

If you’ve set up an advertising account with Twitter, you can access their guide titled, “Twitter for Small Business: A Guide to Get Started.” 

Setting up your Profile for Successful Twitter Marketing

There are two main subjects you want to address before marketing on Twitter for your firm.  You’ll want to utilize your tweets as much as possible, and you’ll want to set up your profile for a professional yet creative appearance. 

Utilizing the Capability of Tweets

Use the following techniques to improve your tweets and increase your marketing with Twitter for your firm:

·         # (Hashtag): use hashtags to center your tweets on a particular subject.

·         @ (Mention): a mention allows you to announce another user and let their followers and your followers see the message.  Consider mentioning clients, but consider mentioning other businesses and venues as well.  If you mention them, they’ll mention you.

·         Links: use the link-shortening tool to post links within your tweets.  The tool can reduce longer links and shorten them to a maximum length of 19 characters.

Set up your Profile to Enhance Twitter Marketing

These simple yet imperative techniques for your profile can increase the range of your marketing on Twitter:

·         Use a profile image that showcases the image of your firm.  Do you have a brand?

·         Write a short yet informative bio about your firm that explains the history, services, and how they compare to other services in the area. 

·         Include a link to your official website within your bio.

·         Consider using a background image for your profile to add visual appeal and increase marketing with Twitter.

Interacting with Followers to Improve Twitter Marketing

You’ll want to search for profiles and users that have interests relating to your services.  Yet, once you start gaining followers, how are you going to keep their interest, encourage them to tweet about your services, and indirectly recruit other followers?  Take the following steps to increase your marketing with Twitter:

Track what Users are saying about your Services

One of the keys to Twitter marketing is researching what users are and are not saying about your services.  If users are not talking about a particular service, what steps can you take to improve these services and increase the marketing on Twitter?

Connect with Users on a Personal Level

This motto is true for all marketing with Twitter, especially in the legal field.  If you’re tweets are too formal, followers will think your firm is all business and no play.  In order to improve Twitter marketing, compile friendly and enthusiastic tweets without jargon.  Followers need to understand what you’re talking about.

Some of the best ways to improve marketing on Twitter and connect with followers personally include the following:

·         include engaging and creative photos about the people are running the firm

·         provide information about the firm that can be found nowhere else

·         share videos and links that can provide answers to popular questions

·         add motivational and inspiring quotes

·         reply and thank people for tweeting about you

Tweet Daily

Marketing with twitter relies on updated information.  Even if the ideas are simple, you’re still engaging followers and improving your Twitter marketing.  Another good way to improve marketing on Twitter is bringing in somewhat unrelated content in order to make new connections between your services and areas followers assumed you would not address. 

Set up a Planner for Content

Writing about the same topics will surely have a negative effect on your marketing with Twitter.  Instead, make a schedule that will address the following categories on different days through the week to improve marketing on Twitter:

·         inside operations of your firm

·         special promotions and deals

·         announcement of your services within the media

·         focused discussion on certain partners

·         helpful information the public can use

Measuring and Improving your Efforts for Marketing with Twitter

You need to start measuring your results to improve your Twitter marketing.  You should consider using the analytics software provided by Twitter, but you should also consider outside analytics software to improve your marketing on Twitter.  You should measure how much traffic your profile is bringing in, how many people are retweeting and making you a favorite follower in order to start improving your marketing with Twitter. 

The following techniques can improve your Twitter marketing and offer measurable results:

1.       Offer incentives that can improve marketing on Twitter.  For example, offer a discount for services to a certain amount of tweeters only if they can get a certain amount of people to retweet about your services.  Make sure the followers understand the incentives completely to protect your marketing with Twitter.

2.       Tweet messages that will encourage conversations to begin.  The more people that start discussing a certain subject, the better you’re marketing on Twitter and chance of bringing in clients.

3.       Consider promoted tweets once your marketing with Twitter has shown signs of growth.  Advertising with a promoted account can connect you to people in your community and make your presence more known with search results.

Twitter Marketing: Conclusion

There are over 140,000,000 active users on Twitter.  If you haven’t begun marketing on Twitter, your potential pool of clients is lacking.  The suggestions within this article can greatly improve your Twitter marketing and make sure you start your campaign off on the right foot. 

The Affiliate Marketing Basics for a Successful Campaign

Affiliate Marketing Basics

There is no set guide on how to do affiliate marketing.  However, if you learn how to do affiliate marketing, you can successfully earn a commission rate averaging about 15-20% on certain products within the legal industry.  There are some risks involved within affiliate marketing, but taking the right steps to set up and maintain your campaign can increase your chances for success. 

Affiliate Marketing Basics: Things to Consider for Planning down the Road

In order to know how to do affiliate marketing, you’ll want to consider several options concerning your campaign.  It’s best to start planning for these options early in order to confront certain challenges later on.  The affiliate marketing basics for planning are listed below:

1. Determine what Companies and Products are Best

The most important part of the affiliate marketing basics is pursuing companies and products you believe could benefit your firm AND the merchant.  You won’t be able to post advertisements from all of your intended companies/products, but if you form a list of your top options, you’ll likely be able to land a couple of those companies. 

2. Investigate Amounts of Commission Offered

Another important point to consider within affiliate marketing basics is the amount of commission you can receive from the companies you wish to pursue.  As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the average rate of commission can range for 15-20%, but that figure can deviate greatly.  Once you know how to do affiliate marketing and become experienced, you can start pursuing companies with higher rates of commission. 

3. Decide whether you’ll recruit

While researching how to do affiliate marketing, many firms will ask whether they need to hire outside help to write and edit the material on the chosen medium of publishing.  Well, the answer is that most firms hire outside workers to help with blogs and websites and then reimburse them with a percentage of the commission or even pay them standard forms of payment.  One of the most important things to consider in affiliate marketing basics is making sure you’ll have enough support to maintain and update your published material. 

4. Protecting yourself against Fraud

While researching how to do affiliate marketing, many firms are concerned by fraudulent programs that can reduce amounts of commission and even take away certain affiliate opportunities.  However, protection against fraud can work the other way around in affiliate marketing basics.  If a firm is not careful, the can unknowingly send out emails or other notifications that classify as spam—resulting in the merchant getting in trouble as well as the firm. 

Affiliate Marketing Basics: Starting your Affiliate Campaign

After you’ve made the following considerations about your campaign, you can take the following basic steps on how to do affiliate marketing:

1. Setting up your Website

This step in how to do affiliate marketing will usually take the most time, and building the right website (most likely a blog) is the most important step to your campaign.  While you’re building the website, you want to deliver only the best content that can relate to your readers and the merchants you’re channeling.  While building your website, don’t rely on unrelated and unpopular ads.  It’s better to sacrifice a handful of general, unrelated advertisements for a more popular advertisement that is related to your content.  Building a good website or blog can take years. 

2. Find the Best Network

While learning how to do affiliate marketing, one of the most important steps is finding the right network for your website.  Some websites provide affiliate marketing basics compared to more complex networks, and you’ll want to evaluate your needs before choosing the best network for your website.  In some cases, you don’t necessarily need a network if you go through the merchant directly.  However, you’ll likely need an affiliate network if you have a smaller website with limited amounts of traffic until your website grows.  You can find ratings and reviews about networks on this website. 

3. Setup your Domain Name for SEO

While learning how to do affiliate marketing, you’ll want to do your research on maximizing your SEO through your domain name.  A good resource for SEO information is the blog under SEOmoz.  If your domain name is long and irrelevant to the information you’re providing, you’ll have poor search engine optimization (SEO).  Before choosing a hosting service, you’ll want check if the blog you’re using supports the service.  These affiliate marketing basics can start your campaign off nicely. 

4. Write your Articles

After learning how to do affiliate marketing setup, you’ll want to start writing your articles.  Affiliate marketing basics for articles usually include keeping the articles around 1,000 words, splitting up the articles into several different posts, and most importantly, making sure the posts are relevant to your targeted audience.  A huge mishap in affiliate marketing basics is writing an article that promotes a product that has nothing to do with your website.  Also, the trick in how to do affiliate marketing is gaining the reader’s trust by writing true and transparent articles. 

You’ll also want to consider keywords while writing your articles.  You’ll want to use service such as Google AdWords to see what keywords and keyword phrases your audience is searching.  Then, you’ll want to place enough sections of those keywords within your article in order to make your writing appear in search engine results.  While learning how to do affiliate marketing, try using keywords that are less used but can still draw in your audience at the same rate.

5. Monitor your Results

After you’ve mastered the affiliate marketing basics and started your campaign, you’ll want to monitor your results every day and make adjustments over time to make readers stay on your website.  The longer they stay on, the larger the chance of them clicking on the advertisement. 

Conclusion: Affiliate Marketing Basics

Learning how to do affiliate marketing is not an easy process.  It’s a long and changing process.  However, staying devoted to your campaign can have great positive results and let you receive a significant amount of revenue. 

It may seem unbelievable, but the majority of companies still have no strategy to create inbound links.  Even some companies that used to work on creating inbound links have stopped, after new updates to Google shocked search engine marketers and limited the use of the biggest inorganic link building strategies.  Whether your law firm has never tried to create inbound links or you're wary about creating inbound links with Google's new precautions, you need this guide.  You'll learn what Google loves, what it hates, and how to deliberately create inbound links that won't result in penalties.

What Does Google Hate?

Google's motto, when it started as a company, was this: “don't be evil.”  While it's up to webmasters everywhere to decide whether they've succeeded in implementing that motto or not, Google hates websites that appear to be evil.

What do they mean by evil?  Basically, Google doesn't want to reward websites (with higher search rankings) that are making the internet harder to understand or harder to use.  For example, websites that used the same keyword over and over, with no content whatsoever, very rapidly ended up penalized by Google's algorithms.

Google believed for many years that a website's success in creating inbound links was one of the best ways to judge its authority and relative worth to web searchers.  As internet marketers learned that it was so important to create inbound links, they started developing new techniques.  

Some of these new techniques for creating inbound links had effects Google believed were, essentially, “evil.”  If Google believed your company had tried to create inbound links that were paid for, or that were spamming other sites, they started penalizing your rankings in 2012.

What Does Google Love?

Google loves when it appears that you create inbound links the old fashioned way: by being too fascinating to ignore.  Whenever you want to know how to go about creating inbound links that Google will love, keep this in mind: the more natural it looks, the more likely it is to help.

For example, you can create inbound links by building an infographic about attorney fees and fee structures—something attorneys and non-attorneys in many different areas will probably find interesting.  Infographics spread really well on the web, and you'll rapidly find that other websites are creating inbound links to your content—even websites you've never heard of in your life.

When this kind of organic inbound link creation happens, it has some features that are easy for Google to identify.  Usually, when you create inbound links this way, the anchor text of the links will vary significantly.  Additionally, it's very likely that there will be many different types of sources linking your content, from social networking websites to blogs to social bookmarking sites to real magazines or newspapers.

The more that your link presence looks like a naturally created one, the more Google will love your website.  You should only create inbound links when you know you can make them look natural.

How to Create Inbound Links Through Blogs

If you want to actually let nature take its course instead of creating inbound links yourself, it can pay off—especially if you know how to make content that people really love.  If you're talking about an area of the law that is of particular interest to a large number of people, it may be fairly easy to get attention and create inbound links through your blog.

Of course, that's not the only way to use blogs for creating inbound links.  You can also create inbound links in the comments of someone else's blog.  If you're going to do this, remember the motto: don't be evil.  Don't post a generic response that doesn't really show whether you've read the blog entry or not.  Make a real response, start a discussion, and it's much more likely that when you create inbound links in your comments they'll stay long enough to be indexed and add their link juice to your website.

If your blog doesn't yet have much traffic but you're putting together interesting content, consider talking to other bloggers.  They may be willing to pass on an inbound link, or even let you have a guest blogger spot to create inbound links to your own website.  Make sure that you don't tell other bloggers that creating inbound links is your primary goal—the goal should always be good content, rather than search engine optimization.

Should I Pay Someone to Create Inbound Links?

While it's certainly still possible for companies to create inbound links inorganically without getting caught, it's getting tougher every day.  If creating inbound links seems too tough for you, outsourcing it carries a set of risks that you need to consider.  It's possible that after they have managed to create inbound links on many, many websites, your inbound linking service will be penalized by Google.  It's also possible that their inbound linking will be to places Google already considers low-value—and therefore won't help your rankings at all.

The only time you should ever pay someone to create inbound links for you is when you can be assured that they are only posting links to contextually relevant content.  If they're not paying attention to the content, they have no business creating inbound links for anyone.  You have every right to know what a link building service's links look like before you buy them—ask them all the questions you need until you're satisfied that they know how to create inbound links without penalties.

Creating Inbound Links with Competitor Analysis

By running an inbound link checker on your competition, you can find out where they've decided to create inbound links.  If these websites allow open registration and posting, you're in luck, because you can now duplicate all of your competitors' efforts at creating inbound links.

Even if you're not able to create inbound links in exactly the same places, this is a good way to see a competitor's link building strategy and what's really working in the real world and your exact geographic area.
 

Guide for Attorneys on Marketing your Blog with Top SEO Techniques

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law

If you need help on marketing your blog, this article covers information on the following strategies:

·         Differences between SEO techniques for blog and other legal websites

·         Researching keywords

·         Domain registration

·         Research trends

·         Use the best headlines

·         Using web analytics

·         Working on structure of your website

·         Ethical networking and the effect of bad networking

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law: Difference Between a Blog and Other Website

Legal websites depend heavily on buying links and spending heavily for placement on search engines.  The SEO techniques for a blog rely heavily on social networking.  Consider the following social elements on SEO and marketing your blog:

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law:

·         engagement with other legal bloggers is essential

·         Rich Site Summary (RSS) allow easily allow readers to subscribe to every post and receive real time notification

·         encourage readers to provide valuable comments to increase the blog’s rank

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law: Research Keywords

There is a large amount of paid keyword tools and free tools as well for attorneys.  The most popular option is Google AdWords, but you can find information on more tools under SEOHandbook:

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #1

·         Attorneys need to use keywords in the content and the important section of the blog, like the title and subsections.  Focus on readability.

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #2

·         Keep up with keyword trends for help in marketing your blog with tools like Google Blog Search, Yahoo! Buzz Index, Google Trends, and more.

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law: Domain Registration

As an attorney, you don’t want to use WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, or other domains unless you’re only starting out.  However, even if you’re starting out, there are great tools for creating domains at a low price. 

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law

·         Consider using GoDaddy.com to register a domain name for your legal blog.  You can register a name for around $10. Dreamhost is another great option. 

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law: Researching Trends

Attorneys need to stay updated on trends within their own field and trends for marketing your blog as well.  Consider YouTube for trends on an internet marketing strategy.  Blog writers can look under the most popular, most discussed, and favorite videos and find updated information daily.

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law

·         Read blogs within your field of law and see what blogs are getting linked.  What strategies are the legal blogs using?  What content are they offering that your legal blog is not?

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law: Using the Best Headline

Marketing your blog depends heavily on descriptiveness and emotion within your title, headline, and sub-headlines.  The following tips seem simple but offer proven results for attorneys:

 Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #1

·         Include a keyword in the headline along with the main subject of the post.

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #2

·         Consider asking a question, listing a number of points in your post, or promising an answer for a particular question.

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law: Using Web Analytics

Many attorneys like to use Google Analytics because it’s free and offers a large amount of options.  You have multiple other options for software when marketing your blog.  You’ll have to research what parts of your website rank well, topics that readers find credible, and the negative aspects of your blog as well. 

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #1

·         track what blogs and legal resources are linking to your blog, what viewers are searching for, and what posts are receiving the most links

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #2

·         Consider using analytics programs like Performancing which tailor specifically to blogs.

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law: Working on Structure

A large percentage of attorneys and firms making simple mistakes in structure that can be easily fixed as long as the content is still intriguing.  Marketing your blog depends on making your most popular content sticking out and duplicated content link back to the original content. 

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #1

·         Consider highlighting material with a side bar to your most popular material, or provide your most popular material on your homepage instead of the newest content.

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #2

·         Provide links to next posts and previous posts to help the reader and enhance crawling from a search engine.

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #3

·         Create categories for your content to increase a page’s rank while marketing your blog.  For example, if you’re in family law, create categories for divorce, separation, annulment, spousal and child support, child custody, and more.

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law: Ethical Networking

This is a top internet marketing strategy.  Blog writers in law need to take extra care so they protect their brand.  While marketing your blog, you don’t want to hold back on any subject in your field of law, but the last thing you want to do is badmouth another firm.  Critique legislation, not legal services. 

The following tips will help when marketing your blog:

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #1

·         Show credibility through your website’s design and formatting, provide complete contact information for your firm, and list credentials of partners involved with the blog.

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #2

·         Provide links to other blogs and.  If able to afford this internet marketing strategy, blog writers should consider a listing in a blog directory as well.

Internet marketing tips for Blog in Law #3

·         Participate in community forums, write guest articles, and share comments on your social media websites.

Internet Marketing Strategy for Blog in Law: Conclusion

The strategies and tips listed within this article are essential while marketing your blog.  Blogging within law is extremely competitive because a large amount of legal blogs use the same strategies and offer content on the same news and cases. 

While marketing your blog for a field of law, don’t set a priority for profit.  You want to draw in readers who access your material every day because these readers are prospective clients.  Blogging is much about brand awareness.  Leave your firm’s profit where it should be. 

In the last year, Google has become very serious about cracking down on companies that are buying their links instead of building them with organic, white hat techniques.  iAcquire, an agency that was suspected of accepting money in exchange for links, found itself completely de-listed on Google in May of 2012, and suddenly it looked like a much worse idea to buy inbound links.  If you're still thinking about whether to buy inbound link traffic, you need this guide.  You'll learn why it's still possible to buy inbound links without having Google notice—but also why these strategies may be risky in the future for lawyers.

Why Is It Important To Have Natural Looking Links?

Even if you do decide to buy inbound links, you'll want to make it look very much like they were never bought.  That's because in their Webmaster Guidelines, Google makes it very explicit that it is not a permitted practice to purchase inbound links to increase your search rankings.

If you're unhappy with your search rankings, Google's suggestion is that you don't buy inbound link traffic, but instead work to build it yourself.  There are many different ways to build inbound links naturally, but for many attorneys, they simply take too much time and involve too much uncertainty to be worthwhile.

This means that you can still buy inbound links today.  Many services allow you to buy inbound link results that are in some way still able to evade Google's advanced detection algorithms.  However, you don't just want to buy inbound links that work today.  Any links you buy should work well into the future, and that's where it gets a bit tricky.

What Company Should I Buy Inbound Links From?

No matter what, you should never buy inbound link traffic from a company that is clearly using what could be described as “black hat” techniques or spam.  If you see a company creating spam links in any way, shape, or form, you need to find a different company to buy inbound links from.  Even if their spam techniques are one step ahead of Google's detectors for now, one day their luck will run out.  Then, you'll wish you had chosen to buy inbound link traffic from a company that had avoided these techniques entirely.

Because a law firm is staffed by professionals, you don't want to look like your links come from the same place as links for erectile dysfunction pills and scammy work from home job opportunities.  You should make sure that any company you choose to affiliate with is also working with other law firms or professional groups.  If they're primarily working with industries known for spam techniques, you should buy inbound links from a different company.

The Difference Between Contextual And Non-Contextual Links

Today, you should only buy inbound link types that are contextual.  If you buy inbound links that don't have any contextual relevance to anything that you're talking about on your website, Google will recognize that these are unnatural links and will penalize you accordingly.

Many services will advertise that they are specifically contextual link building agencies.  When you buy inbound links from these agencies, they'll automatically put them on websites that are contextually relevant to you.  Many of these services will only allow one law firm from a given geographic region to buy inbound link traffic from them, to take away any chance of having a conflict of interest.  These are among the most reputable agencies to buy inbound links from.  There is a very good chance that if you buy inbound link traffic using one of them, your links will be indexed quickly and will stay up for a long time.

Things That Look Unnatural to Google

If you want to build your own links or just evaluate which company to buy inbound link services from, you should know what Google identifies as a sign of unnatural linking.  First of all, websites that have far more inbound links than would be normal for a website with their traffic level are usually considered suspicious.  Usually the way that a webmaster would get such a large number of links to a low traffic website is through purchasing them—which, again, is forbidden by the guidelines.

You should also avoid any large quantity of links with identical anchor text, or links from the same IP address.  Too many identical links or sources looks very unnatural.  It's also very unusual for all of a website's links to be “follow” as opposed to “nofollow.”  If you're not using any nofollow links at all, Google is likely to identify this as overoptimization.

Generally, you will not be de-listed completely from Google if you are suspected of link buying, but you will be penalized in search rankings.  The only companies that get de-listed aren't the ones who buy links, but the ones who sell them.

I'm Overoptimized—What Do I Do?

If you've been sent an email message that says your links are unnatural or that your website appears to be over optimized, it's important not to panic.  By doing some legwork, you can recover your place in the rankings.  First of all, it's time to be honest: did you buy inbound link services?  If you didn't actually buy inbound links or use unnatural link building techniques, you should alert Google right away.  It's totally possible for the algorithms to make a mistake, and by bringing this mistake to their attention you'll not only get your rankings back, but also improve the algorithms so that they identify fewer false positives in the future.

If you actually did buy inbound link services, don't try to convince Google otherwise.  They'll see it, and they'll know.  Instead, you need to start asking for those links to be taken down.  Whenever you buy inbound links, remember that there's always a chance of this, so only buy inbound link services if you believe you'll have the ability to request the removal of these links later.

If doing your SEO research and writing on your own sounds like a mind-numbing task, that doesn't mean that you need to give up on great search rankings.  In recent years, a number of SEO services have been developed to help companies get the search engine optimization results they want.  Up to 80 percent of law firms that initially try to do search engine optimization on their own eventually outsource these responsibilities to an SEO service instead.  Here are seven key duties that SEO services can perform for you, so that you can get back to the business of running your law firm.

#1: Keyword Research

What could be more boring than carefully researching dozens of variants on a single keyword or key phrase?  Not much, which is why many law firms choose to leave keyword research to an SEO service instead of doing it alone.

SEO services can do extensive research into the kinds of keywords that are most likely to generate not only traffic to your site, but traffic that converts.  It doesn't help to have great keywords for traffic generation if the conversions aren't happening, so your SEO service can help you map out “long tail” keywords including specialty areas of law or your exact geographic location.

#2: Content Creation

One of the best ways to do search engine optimization today is to have a blog that discusses relevant legal issues and links to your main firm website.  Guest blogging can also provide you with more inbound links, which help your search engine results page (SERP) statistics.

But what if you don't have time to maintain a blog?  Many attorneys are too busy to create their own blog content, and instead hire SEO services to blog for them.  An SEO service can work with you to develop blog topics that will generate search engine attention and that will be likely to be linked by others.

While it's true that it's best for you to write your own search engine optimization content, SEO services provide a great alternative for attorneys on the go.  An SEO service will also be able to make sure your blog continues uninterrupted, even if you go on vacation or are otherwise unable to make edits yourself.

#3: Social Media Integration

More and more search engine optimization efforts depend largely on social media.  Some of the biggest bloggers in the SEO world are predicting that 2012 and 2013 will be when search and social begin to truly merge.

Even if you don't know the difference between “tweets” and “likes,” you can take advantage of social media by hiring an SEO service.  SEO services can help you plan your social media presence based on your brand identity and their previous successful efforts.

#4: Long Term Planning

Great SEO services won't just help your law firm plan for today's SEO best practices, but also for tomorrow's.  The people who work for your SEO service can keep an eye on the latest trends and upcoming changes to search algorithms so that you will always know about any changes before they happen.

Talk to SEO services about where they feel that the future of SEO is heading.  You should choose between SEO companies based both on the results they can get you today and what they're planning for your firm's future.

#5: Niche Marketing

When you're new to search engine optimization, it can sometimes be hard to see the forest for the trees.  SEO services can help you look at the bigger picture, including keywords and your local market, to help you identify possible marketing niches.  Once your SEO service has identified a viable niche, you can choose to create a new website or landing page to take advantage of this new audience.

Because niche marketing allows for more specific long-tail keywords, it is extremely helpful in making your SERPs more prominent.  You may find that your SEO service can identify niche markets you were already serving somewhat—you'll just know, now, to focus on those markets as a big potential source of revenue.

#6: Mobile Optimization

Mobile internet traffic is expanding greatly every year, and the last three years have each seen a doubling in the percentage of web traffic that comes from smartphones.  What's more, these site visitors are much more likely to become conversions than people viewing websites from non-mobile devices.  However, a traditional website will often display poorly on a smartphone.

That's where your SEO service comes in.  SEO services can help you make your website mobile traffic friendly.  You can use your SEO service to develop a fully mobile-optimized site, or just mobile landing pages to better attract these new, ready to convert web viewers.

#7: Going Local

More than ever, people are doing searches for law firms that are local to their area.  These searches are also much more likely to lead to conversions.  Getting your firm listed during local searches can be tricky, but SEO services can lend a hand.  By identifying local directories (like Chamber of Commerce listings) and major search engine tools (like Google Places) where your website should be listed, your SEO service can guarantee that you are doing everything you can to generate traffic from local search keywords.

Local SEO can be extremely tedious and involve extensive data entry, so this is one of the better reasons to hire an SEO service.  Once your listings are already set up, you may be better able to handle it on your own.

#8: Analytics and Data Collection

If you're not big on number crunching and statistical analysis, you may want to step back and let SEO services take charge.  Analytics tools work best when they're handled by people who are experienced and know exactly what they're doing with your data.

Your law firm can identify key performance indicators that will help you decide whether a particular SEO strategy is working.  The SEO service you hire will help you increase these KPIs substantially using the results of the data they collect from both on-site and off-site traffic.

Even though other ways of using the web have begun to reduce the percentage of web leads produced by searches, over 80 percent of people still use the web for searching.  If you want to be in the first page of results, you need the best SEO service you can find.  Today, some of the best SEO services are using new methods for optimization.  In this guide, we'll try to separate the hype from the real solutions that your law firm needs.  Keep reading to find out which services are offered by the best SEO services for law firms.

Best SEO Services: Full Service Packages

When you're looking for the absolute best SEO service money can buy, you'll want to get some sort of full service package.  Today, many of the best SEO services recommend a blended approach to search engine optimization, rather than a “pure SEO” approach that involves only alterations to your content and keywords.

This blended approach means that the SEO service you've chosen will also handle things like your social media or blogging presence, as well as posting links to your firm's content on social bookmarking websites.  Some of these services will also help you integrate your web advertising with your print, radio, and television ads.

Best SEO Services: Targeting Services

In some situations, you may not need a service to handle everything, but you want the best SEO service possible to identify good niches in your area and help you target the right kinds of potential clients.  Targeting services examine search patterns of people in your area so that your SEO agency can determine who is most likely to respond to which messages you're broadcasting.

Targeting works to improve your return on investment.  The best SEO service can bring up your click and conversion rates substantially with a new targeting initiative.  This is especially valuable if you're already doing some amount of direct advertising.  The best SEO services will help you target your advertising better, so that you're not showing it to as many people who aren't interested.  They'll help you identify negative keywords and niche keywords that you may not have previously thought about.

Best SEO Services: Analysis Services

Leaving the number crunching in the hands of the professionals is a good idea.  Because it's so easy to misinterpret web traffic data, you'll want the best SEO service you can afford to handle any analysis of your traffic.  Doing it right requires a lot of computer knowledge and the ability to distinguish between statistical patterns.  If you don't feel comfortable doing it, that's fine—just hire the best SEO service for the job.

The best SEO services handle analytics like a science experiment, with control groups and experimental groups in A/B split testing.  This kind of marketing experiment can seem boring and tedious for attorneys, which is why having the best SEO service people working on it is a much better idea.

Best SEO Services: Local SEO Services

Today, more traffic than ever on search engines involves people looking for a local service.  If your website seems to have a high bounce rate and is bringing in people from outside your local area, you need to have the best SEO service that you can find take a look at it.  You may discover that you're inadequately optimizing for local results.

In order to get your website back on track for local searches, the best SEO services work to list your website in multiple local directories, as well as incorporating relevant local keywords into your website copy.  By using the best SEO service you can afford, you'll be more likely to have thorough, detailed listings in directories and better copy on your website.

Best SEO Services: Mobile SEO Services

The task of optimizing your company's website for mobile use can seem really daunting.  That's why when people click on law firm websites from their mobile phones, they often see a jumbled up mess of a site full of tiny words that need to be zoomed in on.  That's not attractive to mobile customers, who are likely to go back and find a different law firm website.

Finding the best SEO service to take your firm mobile can be tricky.  Because mobile optimization is so new, not all SEO services are equally good at doing it.  If a service is really the best SEO service for mobile optimization in your area, they should be able to show you some mobile websites they have built that work well and are drawing in a consistent base of mobile customers.

Why Up-To-Date Technique Is Important

Why is it important to hire the best SEO service?  Why not just go with whoever comes in with the lowest bid for your project?  Well, the truth is that the options offered by the best SEO service are likely to be much better, and involve more up to date SEO techniques, than those offered by bargain basement optimizers.

Search engines and spammers are in a constant conflict with each other, and every time a search engine revises its guidelines to be less friendly to spammers, it can also impact search engine optimized websites for legitimate businesses.  By using the best SEO service, you'll ensure that you're not taken by surprise when any of these changes occur, and that you'll be able to respond to the changes as quickly as possible.

Looking Ahead: SEO Service Trends

As standards for search engine optimization change, what constitutes the best SEO service will change as well.  From current trends, it looks like the best SEO services for the future will be those that focus on delivering high quality content and helping businesses focus on getting copy up that people want to read.

In the future, it's likely that even the best SEO service for “pure SEO” will try to take a more blended approach.  By offering more full-service packages, the best SEO services ensure that their business model will continue to be relevant regardless of the direction that search engine optimization takes in the near future.

For years, building inbound links was the best way to get search engines to pay attention to your website.  However, many marketers took advantage of this system by using programs to auto-generate large numbers of low quality links from websites with a low level of relevancy to their own site.  Once Google found out, it fought back with two algorithm updates.  These updates make it so that for the first time, there is such a thing as a negative link.  If low quality links have begun affecting your website's SERPs, you need help.  This guide will help you understand what's going on and how to make it work better.

What is Low Quality Link Traffic?

Low quality links are links that aren't likely to give a consumer unique information or that are unlikely to be what someone searching for a particular topic was actually searching for.  Building large amounts of low quality link traffic was a favored strategy of many marketers for years, and a number of attorneys had begun to use these techniques for search engine optimization.

You can usually identify low quality links because they will come from sources that don't really matter—often sources that will simply accept any content, even if it made little or no sense at all.  These kinds of low reputation websites are not going to help you to get the kinds of quality link traffic you want.  The same goes for blog comment spam.  If a high number of your links come from comment spam, Google has probably already caught you—and the effects won't be pretty once they do.

What Are The Effects of Low Quality Backlinks?

If Google discovers that you have been using low quality link strategies to market your website, they are likely to decide that you are using unnatural linking.  This is not in accordance with Google's webmaster terms, and they reserve the right to lower websites in search rankings—or even stop them from being listed altogether—if they are found to be part of a low quality links scheme.

It's very unlikely that your website will be de-listed unless you're actually running a fraudulent weblinking ring.  However, if your links all come from sources that are simply not very high quality, you're going to notice a sudden and sharp drop in your SERPs.  This means that the huge majority of people who use Google—the ones who only look through the first or maybe the second page of results—are never going to see your website content through organic search, no matter how good it is.

Help!  Google Says I Have Spam Links!

Take a deep breath and don't panic.  Even if Google has sent you an email saying that your website has been penalized for having links from spam websites, all is not lost.  However, to make sure that your firm's marketing efforts aren't hurt for months, you're going to need some quick planning. 

First of all, start by increasing your expenditures temporarily for pay per click advertising.  No matter what else you do to increase your website's reputation again, you'll need to do this to make up for the penalties for low penalty links in the meantime.

Next, we'll look at the newest way to make sure that low quality link spam can't hurt your website's search engine rankings.  This tool is called “disavow links.”

What Does “Disavow Links” Do?

As of November 2012, Google allows webmasters to disavow some of the backlinks that are coming through to their websites.  Generally, you'd only want to do this if you were receiving low quality link traffic from spam websites.  If this is the situation, “disavow links” will let you make those links go away more simply and easily than ever before.

Google still advises that even if you use the “disavow links” tool (which you can find in its Webmaster Tools section), you should be prepared to speak to the webmasters of the offending sites and attempt to have the links removed.  This will prevent your reputation from being damaged further if people see where some of your links are coming from.

How Do I Find Where My Links Come From?

If you're not already using a backlink tracking tool, you should be.  You can find many tools that will work just by doing a Google search for backlink tracker.  If you notice a large number of low quality links—usually a low quality link will be irrelevant and from a website with a low PageRank value—you'll know that you are in jeopardy of being penalized or have been penalized already.

Backlink tracker tools can help you get the sources of your low quality links so that you can correspond with webmasters and have the offending links removed.  If a webmaster refuses to delete your links, you can now at least disavow the link so that Google no longer believes that it was part of your deliberate marketing strategy.

If these links were part of your linking strategy at one time but no longer are, you'll want to make that known to the websites currently hosting your links.  Often, these links can be taken down relatively quickly.  Google understands that some good webmasters were caught up in bad low quality link schemes, and has no problem re-listing your website if it believes that you have actually changed your strategies.

Results of Using “Disavow Links”

When you disavow a link, you're not just getting rid of a penalty.  You're also giving up any PageRank value that may have come from that link.  Disavow links is something you should do only if the link truly is not of any value to anybody searching online.

You can generally expect your website to start rebounding in the SERPs as soon as one to two weeks after you disavow links.  In the meantime, you'll want to focus on other marketing resources, including social media and pay per click advertising.  These will keep your revenue streams high while you recover in organic searches.