Law Firm SEO is dead. Forever. Inbound Content Marketing is IT!
Lawyers and firms are all asking “what happened to my website traffic?” For several years now lawyers and firms have seen a significant decrease in traffic to their website in spite of pouring the same, and sometimes, even more money than ever before to their SEO efforts.
Over the last decade, the main strategy employed by most law firms via an SEO company revolved around attempts to manipulate the all mighty Google to score higher rankings. Many of these strategies included “back linking” (generating large numbers of links from other websites to your own). Many years ago, trying to fool search engines into thinking a firm was much larger or authoritative in a particular area had some success. Google is an extraordinarily intelligent being that has far exceeded the SEO, back linking tom foolery of past years. To provide a great and meaningful user experience Google is constantly scouring the ethernet for valuable, authentic and user friendly content. To best match user with what they are specifically looking for seems to be the goal more than ever.
Hundreds of companies offer Law Firm SEO and online marketing services, however, most of these companies fall into three categories:
- Small Law Firm SEO companies – These are small new businesses, lacking expertise in law firm online marketing which gives mixed results
- General SEO agencies – These tend to be a majority of agencies offering SEO services. Some will offer excellent management though including verticals in several different types of businesses (such as restaurants, painters, spas), and others just don’t have the highly specialized knowledge of what sets law firms apart from other industries.
- The largest of legal services firms are the behemoths of the legal arena with offerings in all areas of legal marketing including software, research, directory listings, and training. The downside of this behemoth vehicle is little flexibility to move quickly in and out of all Google’s latest algorithm which seem to occur more frequently nowadays than the occasional annual update from years past.
And you’d better believe, Google is getting very good at weeding out low quality websites and spammy law firm SEO tactics. The bottom line is that traditional Law Firm SEO is dead and content marketing is here to stay. Best online legal marketing practices demands great content that focuses not on search engine appeal, but rather entirely on the client.