Everything About Search Engine Marketing Blog
One of the most powerful tools for driving new traffic to your law firm's website is a search engine marketing blog. Search engine marketing blogs are now maintained by over 60 percent of America's largest law firms. Whether your law firm is large or small, this guide can help you get started with blogging and avoid some of the pitfalls faced by owners of search engine marketing blogs.
Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #1: Be Prepared
Some of the biggest problems with search engine marketing blogs are caused by a simple lack of preparation. When you decide to install your blog, you should discuss the impact of a search engine marketing blog on your web traffic with your web hosting provider.
Because search engine marketing blogs can drive a great deal of traffic to your domains, it's critical to have a web hosting solution that will fit your needs. If the new traffic is too much for your hosting, you could suffer from downtime, and depending on how your search engine marketing blog is designed, this could take down your main website as well.
Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #2: Participate in Other Blogs
Too many people who start search engine marketing blogs just write in their blog without thinking about commenting on other people's blog entries. One of the best ways that you can improve your visitor count is to comment on someone else's search engine marketing blog periodically.
When you comment on other search engine marketing blogs, don't just post an advertisement for your blog. This will lead to you being perceived as a spammer, and your search engine marketing blog may be dismissed as spam. Instead, try to find search engine marketing blogs that are talking about topics that interest you, and make comments that engage you in the blog's conversation.
Commenting on someone else's search engine marketing blog may not deliver results right away, but often, this person will look at your blog and may link it in a later post. This is one of the best ways to network with other people who maintain search engine marketing blogs like yours, and linking to other people's blog entries is also a great way to get reciprocal links.
Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #3: Get Your Message Out
When a search engine decides what page rank various search engine marketing blogs should have for different queries, it's relying on several things to make that decision. One of the biggest factors in search engine rankings is the number of inbound links you have, and whether those inbound links are from websites that are, themselves, popular and well-respected.
When you write a great entry for your search engine marketing blog, you should try to make that entry appear in more places than one. Owners of some search engine marketing blogs have found that their search rankings improve when they post blog posts, with links back to their blog, to press release or article submission websites. These websites help you build large numbers of inbound links quickly.
The other way to build inbound links for search engine marketing blogs is to use social media. If people in your social media contacts like your search engine marketing blog entry, they'll link to it. Using this method means that you'll have to be very careful to keep your keywords looking like natural language—but for optimum search engine results, you'll want to do that anyway.
Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #4: Facilitate Conversations
The best entries on search engine marketing blogs are often the ones that leave room for discussion and questions. You can facilitate conversations on your search engine marketing blog by asking open ended questions at the end of your blog entries.
For example, let's say you're using your search engine marketing blog to market to other attorneys. You write a great article about handling difficult clients, and you think that your methods definitely work. You can either end the article with your observations, or by opening the floor: “This has worked for me, but what works for you? Tell me your best strategies for helping clients who aren't easy to work with.”
If you want your search engine marketing blog to be conversation-friendly, you'll need to keep an eye on comments to delete anything that involves name-calling or spam. Don't delete comments that just involve a vocal disagreement—search engine marketing blogs that do this are stifling conversation, not encouraging it.
Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #5: Make Your Blog Mobile Friendly
In just a few years, traffic from mobile devices like smartphones and iPads will be more common than traffic from traditional laptop and desktop computers. What does this mean for search engine marketing blogs?
Well, for one thing, it means that you need to make sure that your blog install displays correctly on mobile devices. If your blog is jumbled or squished with impossibly tiny margins whenever it's displayed on an iPhone, you'll lose out on that traffic.
You should also try to keep at least most of your blog entries relatively short. Because it can be a pain to scroll a lot while using a mobile device, search engine marketing blogs with short, concise posts that still show insight will be most successful in the mobile market.
Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #6: Experiment!
If something isn't working, many owners of search engine marketing blogs make the mistake of just stopping their blogging experiment. Before you shut it all down, consider changing up what you're doing with your search engine marketing blog. Sometimes, search engine marketing blogs just need to change who they're marketing to, or what their posts are about.
Whenever you experiment with your search engine marketing blog, you should give your experiment some time to work. Changing the focus of a blog repeatedly can give your existing readers whiplash, and you want to maintain a core of readers who are promoting and linking your entries.
