7 SEO Marketing Rules Every Law Firm Should Know

Marketing with SEO techniques has become one of the most important ways that many attorneys today get new business. 53 percent of small business owners in 2011 said that SEO marketing was “very important” for ensuring the future success of their company. Whether you're using one of the hundreds of SEO marketing services to help you get the most out of your optimization, or are handling it all on your own, keep reading for seven rules will make marketing with SEO much easier.

SEO Marketing Rule 1: Don't Copy the Competition

Let's say your firm has struggled to create successful marketing with SEO. On the other hand, you know of a competitor who's doing great with SEO marketing. A-ha! Time to see what they're doing right and copy it, right? Wrong.

While it's fine to evaluate what a competitor is doing right and wrong when marketing with SEO, copying their strategy is unlikely to work. In all likelihood, if your competitor is that good at SEO marketing, they already have much of their niche locked up. Instead, try working in different areas. SEO marketing services can help you to figure out practice areas that may not be as competitive.

SEO Marketing Rule 2: Give New Efforts Time

Attorneys who are used to attracting new clients with pay per click advertising instead of marketing with SEO may be frustrated when SEO marketing services start working for them. That's because unlike pay per click ads, instant results simply aren't on the table with SEO marketing.

That doesn't make it a bad idea to start marketing with SEO, though. Even though it takes longer for SEO marketing to work, the results will last longer and help your reputation much more than advertisements will.

While it's possible for SEO marketing services to show you some results even in the first week of using new techniques for marketing with SEO, this doesn't always happen. Sometimes it can take three to six months to see your SEO marketing efforts pay off.

SEO Marketing Rule 3: Think Like a Client

Sometimes, lawyers need to bring in SEO marketing services because their content simply doesn't seem to be drawing anyone in. When this happens, you may find that the reason your marketing with SEO is failing is that you're not communicating well with clients. Thinking like a client is one of the hardest (but also, one of the most potentially rewarding) aspects of SEO marketing.

When you think like a client, you won't use a lot of jargon in your website. Instead, your marketing with SEO will look very natural, and won't have any “spam” overtones whatsoever. Thinking like a client also means you or your SEO marketing services will want to address client concerns about pricing and appointments directly on your website.

SEO Marketing Rule 4: Make Yourself Heard

SEO marketing services can help you find your voice online if you haven't already started blogging or using social media websites like LinkedIn and Facebook. Marketing with SEO becomes much easier when you're already talking about legal issues that could bring in clients from search engines.

If you want your voice to be heard by even more people, SEO marketing services can submit your articles to press release websites. However, this kind of technique for marketing with SEO has been discouraged in recent months, because search engines no longer consider this type of “article marketing” to work for generating quality link traffic.

SEO Marketing Rule 5: Think Beyond LinkedIn

While the vast majority of American attorneys are already using LinkedIn, adoption of other social media websites by lawyers has been substantially slower. Even Facebook and Twitter, which are very easy to use and have huge, rapidly growing consumer audiences, haven't been utilized by most attorneys for the purposes of marketing with SEO.

You should also think outside the box and try to share some of your content with relevant social bookmarking websites. Please note that you'll usually only have success using this technique for marketing with SEO if you have actual great content. Bad content tends to simply go unnoticed. SEO marketing services can help you better understand what social bookmarking websites are and how to best use them for your own optimization efforts.

SEO Marketing Rule 6: Use Video For Conversions

Do you know that one of the single best ways to gain conversions is to include video on your website? SEO marketing services can help you put together videos that will attract new business without breaking your budget. Marketing with SEO videos is relatively easy, but you'll need to give your videos a descriptive title and fill out the description fields for every video.

If you're not using video, the simple truth is that you're leaving SEO marketing money on the table. Starting any marketing with SEO video is likely to give you better conversion results, because it gives clients some insight into who you are as a person.

SEO Marketing Rule 7: Write for Humans

Speaking of getting to know you as a person, when you do marketing with SEO, it's easy to start sounding robotic. Any time you do SEO marketing, you're basically writing for a computer audience and a human audience. Until the last year or so, many SEO marketing services would actually recommend writing more for the computer than for the people.

Today, all of that has changed. Google changed their algorithms so that they can more easily detect spam content, and quality (as measured by the number of links you're getting from quality sources) is more important than keyword weighting.

With all the keywords and seemingly endless rules, don't lose sight of the fact that people like to read things that look authored by a real human being. Now, SEO marketing services know that quality content is be the best way to start marketing with SEO.