Attorney SEO…90/10
If you don’t know something you make it sound complicated.
That’s what most SEO gurus do.
There’s money to be made by selling the next big “secret method” or “black-hat tip” or whatever they’re hawking from their soapbox this week.
They cast Google and Yahoo and MSN as the villains, and you as the victim. They claim that only their snake-oil voodoo can get your pages ranked and keep them ranked.
Here’s the skinny.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It simply means, “get ranked higher” in the search engine results…for your chosen keyword.
The higher you rank the more likely you are to get traffic to your site when someone clicks on your listing.
The Importance of Ranking
In simple terms, the reason you should care about your rankings is because every tiny increase in rankings that you receive gives you a substantial increase in traffic.
These are the top 10 results inside Google, and the percentage of times that they are clicked.
| Rank | % of Clicks | Visits per 1,000 |
| 1 | 42.1% | 421 |
| 2 | 11.9% | 119 |
| 3 | 8.5% | 85 |
| 4 | 6.1% | 61 |
| 5 | 4.9% | 49 |
| 6 | 4.1% | 41 |
| 7 | 3.4% | 34 |
| 8 | 3.0% | 30 |
| 9 | 2.8% | 28 |
| 10 | 3.0% | 30 |
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the closer you are to the top of the listings, the more potential customers visit your website.
Visitors select higher results far more often than they select the results below. (The text that displays in the search engine results pages also is a factor…but that’s another discussion.)
So if the search engines were sending out 1,000 visitors per day for a keyword, the #1 result would receive 421 of them.
But each time you step down that ladder there’s a massive drop in the amount of traffic you get.
That’s where ranking matters…big time!
Position #1 might yield 421 visitors..but position #2 would only get 119 (just over 25% of position #1)
A step up up from 6 to #1 could mean you could garner TEN TIMES more potential clients!
These are tiny steps in rankings–But GIANT LEAPS for your practice’s success.
Getting Higher Ranks is all about one thing…
Links.
That’s it.
I wish I could tell you it’s more complicated.
You can get a blank page to rank if you have enough of the right incoming links.
Remember the Pareto Principle? The ol’ 80-20 rule? It kind of applies with SEO.
But it’s more like 90-10.
10% comes from “on-page” factors. Stuff you control right on your own site.
There are only a handful of things you can do…and a bunch of things NOT to do.
Those of you who are old enough to remember the channel selector knobs on TV’s (before we had remotes) will remember the “fine tuning” ring around the knob.
On-page factors are what we use to fine tune your site and make those final adjustments once you get to the front page.
But the real power, the stuff that gets you on the front page, or even the top position, in the first place are “off-page” factors…which are links from other sites, blogs, social media and other places around the internet.
A link is like a vote for your site.
Remember your days in academia? When you wrote a paper you had to reference other material in footnotes and bibliographies.
Think about it. The search engine algorithms were written by academics…PhD’s.
They use the same model.
If your work is cited by other works it must be important right?
It’s the same as your web site. The more places that reference your website, the more important it is in the eyes of the search engines…and the higher you rank.
It’s not much different than precedence in the legal world. If there’s a landmark case that creates a new precedence, it gets cited more often and its importance is elevated.
But it’s not just about numbers. Sure it helps to have more links. But you need to be concerned about who links to you and what they say in those links.
That just makes sense.
CNN linking to your site is more valuable than a gardening website.
A link that has anchor text (the blue underlined words) that says “Dallas DUI attorney” is better than “Click Here”. You can get more details on anchor text by reading “keywords: Leave your ego at home”.
At WebLegalMarketing.com we understand exactly what makes the search engines tick. We own hundreds of websites, have proprietary access to thousands more and can manipulate social media outlets like a puppeteer.
That means that we can use all of these assets to generate and control the right kind of links, in the right numbers and using the right context to push your site to where the traffic is.
Are you getting free search engine traffic?
Our clients are.