Law firm SEO is big business. The more traffic that gets drawn to your site, the more visitors you can potentially convert into clients. This is particularly important for highly competitive retail practice areas such as personal injury, immigration, family, and wills & estates. Unfortunately, the trend is to sacrifice everything for the sake of SEO. Because keywords found in page titles, headings, and body text all inform how search engines rank your website, law firms have been piling-on the generic legal keywords and geographic spam. In this race to the bottom, I wanted to see if I could take the lead and draft home page copy for a brand new imaginary personal injury firm, Mulberry & Yew LLP. Perfect SEO, but at what cost? Read the rest of this entry »
SEO consulting is a booming business. Law firms are routinely solicited to “improve their Google rankings.” Even Google itself receives emails reading:
“Dear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”
Improving organic search engine rankings is an increasingly popular method of drawing non-referred clients to your law firm (so long Yellow Pages). Because the value of each new client tends to be high for many practice areas (personal injury and family law in particular), lawyers are a core target market for SEO consultants. The challenge is to distinguish fly-by-night operations from established, reputable, and effective firms like our friends at Stem Legal (full disclaimer, Skunkworks also advises firms on SEO during website development and through search marketing retainers) . When retaining a consultant of any type, the key is to know the right questions to ask. Here’s a quick cheat sheet: Read the rest of this entry »
Skunkworks client Andrew Feldstein is no stranger to the media. Andrew appears regularly through various news outlets as a leading commentator on family law matters. His firm, Feldstein Family Law Group, is itself a powerhouse in offering web-based educational legal resources to the general public. In particular, the firm’s YouTube channel offers over 67 videos of Andrew and lawyers at his firm presenting on family law matters in Ontario.
Andrew approached Skunkworks with an impressive amount of content to be edited and transformed into bite-sized episodes for his YouTube channel. We have also added some additional production flourishes to ensure a consistent, professional feel for the new videos.
Demonstrating subject matter expertise is an excellent marketing approach for law firms and Feldstein Family Law Group’s YouTube channel provides a rich information resource for people in Metro Toronto or elsewhere in Ontario who are considering divorce or want to learn more about how family law issues are dealt with in that Province.
Most of our clients may not fully understand search engine optimization (SEO), but they know that its important. This vague concern is amplified by the onslaught of solicitations from SEO consultants, vendors, and a motley crew of hustlers with varying levels of legitimacy. To get you started, I have prepared this handy 5 point guide for thinking about SEO for your law firm. This is the same message I relay to our clients. Read the rest of this entry »
We will be discussing SEO on this blog over the coming weeks. While the best starting point is with Google, we do have our own thoughts and recommendations to add to the discussion. The world of SEO consulting can be a very shady business and we feel that it is better to make our positions public rather than pretend we have some magic formula that we’ll relay if and only if you sign a 1 year SEO contract.
While the point of SEO is to draw clients to your business (the goal of marketing generally), the subsidiary consideration is that you probably want to be awesome. Most people will admit to having googled their own name at least once. The process can be a voyage of self-discovery. Accordingly, we were very pleased to run a search for Skunkworks client David Bilinsky and see that the first headline read “Dave Bilinsky is Awesome.” It flows from a comment made by Nicole Garton-Jones of Heritage Law on Vancouver Buzz.
The upcoming posts will shed light on how you too can be awesome…or at the very least how Google will come to its own conclusions.
