I encourage every lawyer to understand some basics about how search engines work. In fact, we have made it a priority to provide several educational materials for law firms on the subject of search engine optimization. However, the question of do-it-yourself SEO vs. hiring a professional continues to circulate throughout the web.
As the saying goes, “He Who is His Own Lawyer Has a Fool for a Client”. Is the same true when it comes to SEO for your law firm? The answer, sometimes.
There are many basic SEO tasks that most relatively web-savvy attorneys can probably handle on their own. Optimization of title tags, use of images, and headings, etc. just to name a few.
And there are some additional methods, that are vitally important to generating results, like link building, that aren’t necessarily complicated, as much as time-consuming.
However, there are a whole lot more that require more technical web knowledge than most attorneys would ever care to have.
The truth is that the decision of whether or not to hire an SEO consultant really depends on your web marketing goals and the level of competition in your segment of the legal services market.
Let’s face it, if you’re a Chicago personal injury lawyer, law firm internet marketing competitive landscape is saturated. Having an experienced law firm SEO consultant is essential.
On the other hand, if you’re an intellectual property lawyer in Boise, you may find that you are able to produce some significant results on your own.
The decision of whether or not to hire a professional shouldn’t be taken lightly. Costs associated with law firm search engine optimization can be pretty steep. Also, due to the disparity between what most lawyers know about SEO and the low barrier of entry to becoming an “SEO expert”, there is a lot of “snake oil” in the market.
Generally speaking, hiring an SEO is a lot like hiring a lawyer. You can avoid a lot of headache by researching your law firm SEO, talking to their clients, and simply by searching for them on Google. Let’s face it if they can’t generate business for themselves on Google, how are they going to generate business for you?
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 […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
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 […]
