Is It Worthwhile to List Your Law Firm on Online Legal Directories?

Information goes out of date quickly on the Internet.  Remember when a debate raged

about whether law firms should have Twitter accounts?  That social media platform hasn’t been called Twitter for an Internet eternity, and the consensus has changed numerous times about how, if at all, lawyers should interact with it.  Listing your company’s website on online business directories is an ancient search engine optimization (SEO) tactic; it goes all the way back to the time when you could not assume that Google was the search engine that everyone was using to find the contact information of local businesses.  Do business directory listings even count anymore?  Do Google and its human users even notice them amidst all the rich snippets, AI-generated content, and noisy videos out there competing for their attention?  It turns out that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and despite all the other kinds of legal marketing content out there, listing your law firm on online business directories is still an important aspect of your marketing strategy.

Your Law Firm’s Contact Information According to You, Not According to Bots

Name, address, and phone number (NAP) are a cornerstone of the content marketing strategy of any business.  It may sound boring, but the most important thing that clients need to know about your business is not what makes you unique but what your business is called and how to contact you.  Google’s bots are in the business of finding information that responds adequately to users’ search queries.  If a user searches for “personal injury lawyer in Fairbanks,” Google will display a link to your website if its bots determine that you are a personal injury lawyer in Fairbanks.  Of course, Google makes a lot of inferences, and as an increasing share of the content online is chatbot-generated, its inferences are becoming less accurate.  It is not just your imagination if you think that Google is getting dumber.

The beauty of online business directories is that you enter your business information manually.  If your law firm’s address or phone number changes, you should update the information on your own website as well as on the business directories where you have listed your site.  Google corroborates the information on your website with the information you have listed on the business directories, so it can be sure that all of the information belongs to the same business.

Are Online Legal Directories Useful for More Than Just NAP?

Customers sometimes read online business directories, too.  You should list your law firm on law-focused directories, such as FindLaw, SuperLawyers, and LawInfo, so that prospective clients can compare how close you are and the types of cases you take to other law firms in the same city.

Online Directories Are Just One Aspect of Content Marketing

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can provide well-researched, readable blog posts and page content for your law firm’s website.