The Best SEO Services For Lawyers: Good Signs/Red Flags
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.
