When you have a question that you want to know the answer for, what are you most likely to do to find your answer? Well, if you’re like most people in our modern, digital age, you will probably go to your computer, smartphone, or tablet and bring up a search engine to type in your inquiry, or ask your Siri or Alexa out loud for the answer. While it is great that we can easily search and discover all of this information, do you know how you are able to find these answers? The answer is an ever-evolving practive called search engine optimization, or SEO. Your SEO strategy is key to your overall marketing effectiveness.
What is SEO?
There is no simple, one sentence answer for what SEO actually is. While there are many factors that go into it, put simply, SEO is the practice of getting pages on your website ranked highly enough organically (not by paying) on search engines such as Google, Bing,and Yahoo to show up in search results. That means that when people are searching for a question or service, they can possibly come across your website for their answer.
Most search inquiries that people have will be informational, transactional, or navigational. An informational search is one to find the answer to a question, such as “why is the sky blue?” A transactional search is one where someone most likely has the intent to purchase for a product or service, such as “womens red heels.” Lastly, a navigational search is one where a person types a word or website name into their search bar to bring them to a website, such as searching for “walmart.”
Those with the best SEO tactics and articles are the answers that you see displayed prominently on page 1 and in the top spot, vying for your attention. While a successful SEO strategy depends on many factors, basically, SEO helps you to increase the quality and quantity of web visitors to your webpages and overall website.
Quality visitors are important because you don’t want people coming to your website who aren’t interested in the services you provide. If you are a divorce lawyer, you’re not going to product content to bring readers to discover what the best restaurants in your area are. You want to make sure that once people land on your website, they are curious about the content you are delivering and stay on your site. The quantity of visitors is another very important factor to show Google (or any search engine) that a lot of people find your content relevant, earning you a higher score.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO is important for businesses for many reasons. Having good SEO means that more users will find your website and the content that you are producing.
In turn, this means that more people will be aware of your services and offerings, and you can potentially obtain more customers simply from having a great SEO strategy.
What is an SEO Strategy?
Just like the practice of SEO, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to search engine optimization. Having an SEO strategy means making a plan of producing the best content with relevant keywords and search terms that your ideal audience and customers are searching for, as well as organizing your website and content into a way that the search engines like Google will be able to crawl and understand to give you higher rankings.
When you can successfully rank high for the keywords that your potential clients are searching, then you have more access to these people that may have never heard about your firm or what you do previously. There are many things to consider when building an SEO strategy, such as:
- Relevant keywords to target
- Backlinks
- Website structure
- Blog Topic
- And more!
How Can SEO Help My Firm?
SEO is a huge part of not only digital marketing, but should be a main part of your overall marketing strategy as well.
When you can bring more people to your website, as well as show up more often in the search engines to make more people aware of your business, then you have a better chance of increasing your customers and therefore increasing your revenue.
If you do not have an SEO strategy, then when someone may be searching for an attorney near them, they possibly won’t discover your firm or even know that you exist as an option. When you have good SEO tactics in place, however, you will show up in the Google Local Pack as a business near them, and your articles may show up on page one of the search results to an inquiry that they had.
The more clicks you get to your website, the more people you can get interested in your services, and the more people you can possibly get into your marketing funnel to target with ads, marketing emails, and more. While SEO isn’t a plan to secure a client immediately, it has great returns in the long run.
SEO for Attorneys
If you are not well-versed in SEO, or simply do not have the time to dedicate to this in-depth practice, you can always hire someone that specializes in SEO for attorneys. Just like you cannot rely only on offline marketing nowadays, you also cannot survive without a great SEO strategy to help your agency succeed and attain more clients. Get a great SEO strategy in place for your firm, and you will see the results start to happen.
