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The Role of Search Engine Optimization in Law Firm Digital Marketing

by Joe Balestrino • January 4th, 2019 • SEO | Blog

law firm digital marketingLaw firms working on their digital marketing should be sure to develop an SEO strategy. Without SEO, or search engine optimization, you will be missing out on a key aspect of advertising: the ability to find your law firm just by searching for relevant keywords. A website without optimization is similar to having a store without a sign; clients need to know you exist before they can find you.

SEO Takes a Holistic Approach

When it comes to digital marketing, SEO plays an important role in driving new clients via online search. You do this by improving your search engine result page (SERP). To make the most from SEO, you should use it in conjunction with other search-boosting methods, such as Pay-Per-Click advertising.

Factors Playing a Role in SEO

SEO is a complex strategy that includes numerous components. This is why so many companies choose to hire an external SEO firm to take care of this type of marketing. Your SEO ranking will be based on things like your website names, URLs, meta tags, page content, types of links, accessibility/usability, and page design.

When determining the ranking of websites, search engines like Google use crawlers that crawl webpage content. The crawler looks for new pages on your website as well as updates but cannot crawl flash movies, images, password protected pages, directories, frames, or JavaScript. After crawling, the tool will index your page in a huge database. When someone searches for a word or phrase, the search engine will look for that phrase or word in the indexed pages. It uses its own algorithms and the above factors to decide which pages are the most relevant to the search. Each search engine uses its own algorithm, and most, including Google, tend to announce any major changes to their algorithms, so you have time to make adjustments.

SEO Is a Component of Law Firm Digital Marketing

When you think of the role of search engine optimization in digital marketing, remember that it is just one piece of the whole. SEO strategies focus specifically on building search engine rankings while digital marketing aims to boost the overall online reputation of a company. Other strategies within digital marketing include banner advertising, viral marketing, thought leadership, blogs, sponsorships, email marketing, and more.

SEO and Digital Marketing Teams Must Work Together

Since SEO is one of several strategies within the realm of digital marketing, the teams focused on these two tasks must work together. The social media marketing strategy, for example, will enhance SEO by encouraging natural backlinks to your page, which boosts its rank. Or the teams responsible for paid searches and organic SEO rankings can work together to optimize pages and create plans for keywords. There are numerous other opportunities for collaboration as neither SEO nor digital marketing exist in a vacuum.

Takeaway

In our 2018 Law Firm Digital Marketing Survey we found that a quarter of the firms surveyed said that they have a comprehensive SEO strategy in place. Half of the firms optimize for some keywords, but not the entire site, while nearly 20 percent admitted that they do not optimize. However, as we’ve discussed SEO for law firms shouldn’t be optional. When firms make the investments into building a website and creating valuable content, it should be easily discoverable. If you need help integrating search engine optimization into your law firm digital marketing strategy, contact us for an SEO audit.

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