With all the things you do to keep your law firm afloat, the last thing you want to deal with is search engine optimization, or SEO.
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| SEO for Law Firms: What’s Snake Oil, and What’s Worth Doing? |
Not only is SEO hugely time-consuming to do yourself, but the information out there on doing things The Right Way—the way that won’t force you to always be one step ahead of Google, hoping they don’t catch on to your “discouraged” tactics—is hard to find. These true best practices are a diamond in the rough… where “the rough” is a bunch of shady con men peddling acronyms to people with too much on their plates already!
Contrary to what those “colorful characters” may say, your site’s performance in the search engines isn’t something that can be easily manipulated—in the long run, don’t bet on outsmarting Google. If (or when) they catch on, they’ll penalize you by de-ranking or even de-listing your site entirely.
That’s why taking advice from the wrong place—or worse, hiring the wrong SEO firm—can ruin your ability to attract the clients who are looking for your law firm.
So, let’s talk about a few tell-tale giveaways that the advice you’re getting is snake oil. When you see or hear these things, you’ll know to run, not walk away.
Snake Oil Strategy #1: Over-optimization & Keyword Stuffing
No one ever comes out an says they want to over-optimize a site, but it’s easy to spot. It looks something like this:
“Dallas Personal Injury Lawyers Nussbaum & Nussbaum Law Firm, Home of Accident & Injury Attorneys in Dallas, Texas”
A headline like that is a clear example of what’s known as keyword stuffing—trying to squeeze your keywords into every nook and cranny, and ending up with something obviously artificial.
Snake oil SEO “gurus” believe (or claim to believe) that this is the most effective way to get indexed quicker and ranked higher in Google. They want you to pack as many keywords as possible into your headlines, your text, your meta tags, your image tags, and more. Worse, they might even suggest making some of them invisible so that visitors never see them.
The problem?
Google & other search engines aren’t stupid. Like humans, they can tell how unnatural those pages are. And, like humans, they aren’t amused. Keyword stuffing is an easy target for penalization—instead of propelling your site to the top of search engine results, you’ll be shoved straight to the bottom as punishment.
Don’t take anyone’s advice if they suggest (whether outright or in samples of their work) that you artificially pump keywords (even location-specific keywords) into your pages. By all means, use key phrases wherever they’re appropriate, but your pages should always feel natural to the humans who will eventually read them.
Snake Oil Strategy #2: Linking Here, There, and Everywhere
The snake oil SEO salesman will say, “Google loves links, and the more links you have pointing to your site, the better. So, we’re gonna get as many links as possible your Web site any way we can.”
(They’ll never actually say things like “any way we can,” but you can bet it’s implied!)
The problem?
Google, in particular, considers every link as a recommendation, and when appropriate, links indicate that the rest of the world considers your site to be important or valuable.
But, Google is clever enough to know that links from an unrelated or spammy Web site don’t really mean anything. They can recognize that there’s no rhyme or reason, for example, for an ice cream distributor in Vegas to link to the Web site of a divorce lawyer in Kansas city. Yet those are the kind of links these “linkbuilding” schemes will get you:
thousands and thousands of links from totally irrelevant Web sites, forum profile pages, abandoned blogs, and anywhere else that facilitates automated link exchanges.
Make no mistake—links are good. The catch, though, is that Google evaluates the source of links, and when it detects a pattern of spam-flavored links, it sees it as an attempt to game the system… then it penalizes the offending site.
Some snake oil SEO salesmen will suggest replacing an irrelevant link strategy with a purchased link strategy. They won’t link to a site from just anywhere; they’ll instead link to your site with a paid link from established Web sites with a seemingly good reputation. This, too, is problematic, since Google knows some people buy links for the sole purpose of gaming the system. When Google suspects a Web site has paid links pointing to it, they penalize the site.
Want an example? Check out the JC Penney link scheme, and the hammer that Google brought down on them.
JC Penney’s search rankings plummeted after this story came to light, thanks in large part to their hired gun, SearchDex. SearchDex purchased links on JC Penney’s behalf, and not even JC Penney’s long standing in the e-commerce community could hold off Google’s wrath, which, consequently, reduced the company’s search engine standings so much it made national news.
To avoid an embarrassing front-page news story, your law firm needs a link building strategy that sends traffic from relevant, legitimate, respectable local Web sites using relevant, legitimate, respectable local keywords.
Snake Oil Strategy #3: Employing Gateway, Doorway, and Landing Pages Galore
A gateway, doorway, or landing page is a single Web page sitting on a single, keyword-optimized domain (like
www.personalinjurylawyerdallas.com and www.dallaspersonalinjuryattorney.com). The snake oil folks often suggest creating tens or hundreds of these things, and having them all link back to your Web site. The theory goes that if one site doesn’t rank well (or if Google catches on to one site’s crazy schemes), the other sites can pick up the slack.
The problem?
Besides employing the useless linking strategy discussed above, these single-page sites serve no other purpose than to catch search engine users and send them to a different website. They’re often poorly designed and written, duplicated elsewhere, and over-optimized to high-heaven (see Snake Oil Strategy #1 above). Google doesn’t like these sites, because they offer a generally terrible experience to the end user. Consequently, wherever possible, Google will remove them from its index or shove them so low in the listing that they may as well even exist.
You don’t want that. Your law firm’s Web marketing strategy needs to focus on being so useful, so valuable to visitors that these single-page sites aren’t necessary.
Snake Oil Strategy #4: Buying Traffic, Traffic, and More Traffic
Everyone knows that lots of traffic goes a long way toward bringing in clients for your firm. That’s why the snake oil SEO crowd suggests getting traffic any way they can. If you can get boatloads of traffic, the reasoning goes, you’ll get boatloads of clients, too!
The problem?
Not all traffic is created equal. If your local law firm’s Web site is getting traffic from around the world, you’re missing the point of having a local presence. You can’t represent a client from China or India or Russia… in fact, chances are you can’t represent people from more than a couple of states. The “pure” number of visitors you get isn’t near as important as the number of potential clients that visit your site.
(To make things worse, SEO firms are notorious for artificially inflating your traffic numbers. This “purchased” traffic typically comes from nothing more than machines programmed to repeatedly visit a series of pages. Not only are the visits from Russia, they’re from Russian robots!)
Again, this isn’t what you want or need. You only benefit from real, interested traffic in locations you can actually serve. A Web marketing strategy that focuses on creating value for your prospects will get you just that in the long run—nothing more, nothing less.
Snake Oil Strategy #5: Cloaking
The snake oil crowd has a favorite tactic—a way to pull a fast one on Google. They’ll put a computer program in place that shows different Web pages based on who’s looking. That is, when Google visits the site to add it to the search index, they show a page about, say, restaurants in Dallas. But, when a human visits the site, they instead see a page about your law firm. Badda boom, badda bing, you’re getting traffic for any keyword you can imagine!
What could go wrong, right?
This technique is called cloaking, and for starters, it’s not allowed. Second, it makes for an awful user experience—imagine you were enticed onto a site by a promise of reviews of the top restaurants in your area, only to be presented with a page about a law firm. What are the chances that you would actually pick up the phone and call them? No way, right?! You’ll simply leave the site (and with a bad taste in your mouth to boot).
Of course, when Google discovers a Web site that uses cloaking, they often blacklist the site entirely.
Not convinced? Check Google’s official stance on the matter below:
The bottom line is simple. Whether you’re talking about how to use keywords, how to get links, or how to show Web pages, keep it simple.
Stick to an honest, transparent strategy that doesn’t try to trick anyone—your visitors, your clients, or Google. An SEO strategy built on those fundamentals won’t just do well now—it will survive any changes that Google makes in the future.
Learn how you can get more traffic to your firm’s site—the right way
At this point, you have a good idea of how to avoid the sleazy, short-sighted strategies some SEOs will try to sell you. But, you might not know the right way to get clients from the Web.
That’s why we put together our free email course, Supercharge Your Firm’s Lead Generation. Sign up below, and over the next couple weeks, we’ll show you the exact techniques we use to build a well-oiled marketing machine that brings in business for you & your firm—from SEO to actually closing business.