It's easy to forget that there was a time without the Internet. However, it's important to remember that the Internet, search engines, and social media have all evolved to connect people like never before. When you cut through to the core philosophy of what search engines are really trying to do, it becomes apparent that your reputation building efforts offline have a huge impact on your online visibility.
Search engines need to provide useful results to their users (except arguably for Google who has now become the interchangeable term for search). Therefore, they are in a constant struggle to identify the most relevant, trusted, and authoritative results for any particular topic online. However, relevance, trust, and authority can also be established offline, and in fact, can have more significant impact on your web presence than your online activities. Here are a couple of examples:
You attend, sponsor, or speak at, a seminar or other legal organization event. The organization has a website. They have a page that lists sponsors and speakers with links to the sponsors' websites.
You are interviewed by a local news source. The article includes a link back to your website.
You win a high-profile case. Reporters cover it. They link back to your website.
These are just a couple of examples of how your activities offline can have a significant impact on your online presence. Links generated from these activities are often the most powerful. Needless to say, they are also often more difficult to acquire. Links of this nature take nurturing. Contacts need to be established, anchor text optimized, and follow-ups pursued. This can become a very time-consuming process. However, investing time (or hiring someone to manage your web strategy) in these efforts can be some of the best investments you can make in terms of increasing your visibility online.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
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The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
