Posts Tagged ‘search engine marketing’
Intuitive Navigation for Legal Experts
The design of your website can influence whether or not a client will choose you. One problem I often find is poor navigation. If someone has trouble or gets confused when searching through your website, they will likely leave your website and search for another legal expert. Think about when you go to a website and you can’t find what you are looking for… you leave. If you can’t find the information that you are looking for within the first 8 seconds, you are likely to leave that website and move on to the next site that appears in the search engine. You may have the more relevant content, but if the user can’t find it, then it doesn’t matter.
Intuitive navigation is important to create a lead. If you do a search for bankruptcy law firms in Dallas you come across the website for Dallas bankruptcy lawyer, Harriet Langston. The navigation for her website is intuitive and easy to use. She has a column on the left side with her core pages listed at the top and the areas of practice links listed underneath.
Having a good navigation isn’t hard to do. Before you design your website, think about the topics you want to discuss and what pages you need. Then arrange them into categories and subcategories. A quick way is to create index cards with each topic and create an outline. Decide on a few core Pages (Home, Practice Area, Our Firm, Contact Us, etc…) and work from there. Click here for more information about web standards for your website.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) is the best long-term solution for getting your law firm’s website or blog to the top of organic search results and keeping it there.
SEO and SEM involve many different approaches to web content and design, plus external methods, that all come together to ensure that you’re providing helpful information to the right people (your local clients) and generating as many promising, legitimate leads as possible.
Link-Based SEO
Providing links to your content and website from external sources such as other websites and blogs tells search engines that your site is popular and relevant. This helps you achieve higher rankings and visibility in organic results.
You can participate in link and article exchanges with colleagues or other relevant establishments, which also boosts your rank.
Keywords in Your Content
Keywords, keywords, keywords. They’re everywhere, and you can’t overlook them if you want to be successful in the online market and get the leads you want. You can try to compete with the millions of others who are going for a slice of the same keyword pie, or you can do a little research and find some niche keywords that apply more uniquely to your particular area of practice and geographic location.
A skilled marketing professional can work the right keywords into natural and useful copy to not only attract users, but deliver worthwhile information. Having good optimized content on your side is great for your online and offline reputation.
Optimize Your Social Media Content
If you actively share updates and law information on a micro-blogging site, consider utilizing (or having your marketer utilize) SEO for this type of communication, too. You can make these posts keyword-rich and encourage them to be picked up in search results.
Social media content, such as a regular full-length blog, needs to be optimized too. Clients can find you via your blog or website if you use keywords (especially geographical ones), exchange links, and emphasize words, among other methods. Attempting to gain attention on a social bookmarking website can have its advantages, but over the long-term, simply putting in the effort to optimize your social content as well as your website’s content will pay off and consume less time.
This blog covers but a few of the many possibilities that come along with SEO. There are quite a few solid approaches to the process that all work very well together and yield the desired results. Utilizing the knowledge you have about your client base, you can use the right keywords to attract the attention of the leads you want.