One of the most time-intensive, methodical and repetitious tasks in the context of marketing a law firm is SEO (search engine optimisation).
SEO is a fundamental aspect of marketing your legal practice, it’s ultra-competitive, prone to algorithm shifts by search engines and needless to say it’s expensive. But all that said there really is only one question you need to ask your law firm SEO agency prior to engagement and that’s, “show me your results.”
What do you mean?
SEO agencies and SEO consultants can wax lyrical about the importance of SEO, the strategies they deploy or don’t deploy, but fundamentally there is only thing that counts and that is where do their law firm clients rank. Importantly, you want to see their rankings specific to the legal industry.
How to Find out the Rankings
It’s not always readily apparent to most law firms in engaging an SEO agency how good they are. Importantly prior to engagement look at their law firm clients and better still in a highly competitive area. The other thing you need to be mindful of is to ensure that the keywords they hold out as worth chasing are in fact those that garner search results. In other words, if you’re a family law practice in Perth, Australia a keyword like “ collaborative family lawyers Perth” might sound feasible but according to Google no one is searching that term. It follows then that it’s likely there are no competitor firms chasing that keyword and to get your firm ranked for it will probably be relatively easy. Now, that’s not to say your law firm shouldn’t chase what we call “long-tail keywords” but they should not be the number #1 objective.
This practice comes as no surprise to us as we see it play out often most recently with a criminal law practice whose SEO agency was chasing not only very low hanging fruit but also completely irrelevant terms. What shocked us most was that it appeared that they may have been binging on American crime shows and transcribed a bunch of keywords terms that have no place in the relevant state criminal law jurisdiction. They carried the same approach to their Google Ads work and little wonder there were no results.
What Should be our Next Steps?
SEO should always be considered in a broader discussion relating to your law firm’s marketing generally. It’s no good being fixated on SEO as the one and only lead generation source if your firm is in a highly competitive niche. The money you may spend here in hope that you’ll rank at some point in the future may be better played as secondary to potentially running Google Ads. Yes, you probably should be doing both!
At Fast Firms, we have a proven track record in SEO, as we do in executing Ad campaigns. Check out these results.
Get a Free SEO Analysis
Reach out to us at Fast Firms and we will undertake an analysis of your current SEO position and provide an honest assessment on prospects of chasing specific keywords.
