Understanding all the ways that your attorney SEO consultant can help you may be very confusing. So here's a real-world example that connects some of the dots. An attorney writes a blog post about the Dallas police announcement of a “No Refusal” Labor Day weekend.
The following year, a local online newspaper reporter begins research for an article on a 'no refusal' program planned for the 4th of July weekend. While researching, the reporter comes across the lawyer's no refusal labor day post. The reporter contacts the lawyer for commentary for the article. The article goes live and the reporter quotes the lawyer in the article. Unfortunately, the article doesn't contain any links back to the lawyer's original post.
Fortunately, the attorney's SEO consultants were closely monitoring mentions of the lawyer's name online. When they saw the article, they began a process to have the article updated to include a citation to the lawyer's blog. This is a great link from a local news site that is completely organic.
So what are some lessons that can be learned from this scenario:
Lesson 1: I don't need an SEO consultant, I can do that myself
Many of you that reads this may be thinking, I could do that myself. I could set up a Google Alert for my name, and then work to contact the site to get the article updated. And I would completely agree, with two caveats. First, it might take you some time to figure out how and who to contact to get the link updated. Second, you need to be thinking about the technical aspects to acquiring the link. However, if you have some extra time on your hands to monitor mentions of your name online and the skill involved in getting the link added, then I would agree that you could do this aspect of SEO on your own.
Lesson 2: It all starts with content
To me, the bigger lesson here is recognizing the importance of publishing web content. Without the initial blog post, this scenario is much less likely, if not impossible, to be realized. We hear all the time from lawyers that they simply don't have time to publish content. But making investments into content, whether with time or money, are absolutely critical to having success in search engines. This is going to become even more true as search engines become better at recognizing the differences between great, good, and crappy content.
Of course, this is only one way that your attorney SEO consultant can assist you. This just happens to be an example that is fairly straightforward. There are many other instances that can become much more difficult to understand without additional knowledge about how the web and search engines work.
And of course, if you're looking for some more information, we're happy to help.