Perhaps a senior partner at your law firm is still feeling chuffed with himself because he hired an SEO expert to design your law firm’s website back in 2010. If you are lucky, your current website is now useless. More likely, the features that helped your site’s SEO rankings a decade ago are now serving to move your site farther down the list of Google’s organic search results.
Even if you consulted an SEO expert recently and have been working to implement the expert’s recommendations, there is still more work to be done. Remember all those Internet rumors several years ago about a new Google algorithm, which the blogosphere dubbed “Fred?” Well, there isn’t just one Fred; Google is changing its algorithms all the time to make itself more useful to real Internet users. Google debuted more than 3,000 new algorithms in 2018 alone. The point is that SEO is not something you do just once, or even something you do just once a year. Search engines are always evolving, and your legal website content should always be evolving with it.
Being One of the Top Ten Search Results Is No Longer Good Enough
Until a few years ago, law firms’ digital marketing strategies tended to focus on making your site rank on the first page of results for a Google search query consisting of your practice area and your city, such as “DUI lawyer Wichita.” In their current form, Google search results pages make you scroll past several paid ads (marked “ad” next to the result) and then a local 3-pack (the contact information of several local businesses related to the query, as well as their locations on a map) before you even get to the first result. For some searches, there are three organic results or fewer on the first page of results; sometimes there is only one. The moral of this story is that the only way to be sure that your law firm ranks on the first page of search results is to be the first organic result.
The Future of Keywords
As the scope of SEO has evolved over the years, so has the nature of SEO keywords. It used to be as simple as having the phrase “DUI lawyer Wichita” appear frequently in your page content (but not frequently enough to make Google suspect that you were keyword stuffing in sentences with natural sounding syntax, a difficult enough feat in itself. Today, an increasing number of searches by prospective clients are voice searches on mobile phones; these queries are complete sentence, 20 or more words long, and replete with prepositions and other words that were not part of SEO keywords a decade ago. Furthermore, Google can interpret users’ typos with remarkable accuracy. It can tell from context that a user’s mistyped gibberish really means “dui lawyer” instead of “dyi layer,” for example.
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The constantly evolving nature of SEO means that you need the services of legal content writers not just today but all the time. Contact Law Blog Writers to get started.