5 myths about SEO
Law firms are taken to the cleaners by SEO hucksters every day. Must be rule #1 for ex-yellow page sales people in SEO sales training class to hit up lawyers - they have money, they're desperate, they don't know what's going on and they won't hold you accountable as they don't know what SEO consultants do.
My latest SEO tips come from Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, and publisher of Top Ranking Blog, one of the blogs you ought to add to your feeds. And these tips apply equally to blogs as well as websites. If you haven't learned from me by now, blogs are just websites, except a heck of a lot more effective when marketing.
Lee posts 5 Myths about SEO. I'm giving you only the highlights and a few personal comments so read the whole post.
- Search Engine Optimization is a collection of tricks to fool search engines. If you’re ‘fooling’ the search engines, then you’re probably fooling users too.
- People in our market don’t use search engines. Right, when in fact nearly 70% of execs and in-house counsel turn to the net, during the law firm selection process. And they are not just searching firm/lawyer names or going to Martindale.com
- SEO is a single event. Fact is creative link building, creation and promotion of new content, integration with other online/offline marketing, and social media are key.
- SEO is a function of IT. In fact, SEO initiatives should be managed strategically by the business like any other major marketing initiative.
- Our site doesn’t get a lot of visitors, so SEO wouldn’t work for us. Like Lee, I do hear that from what appear to be educated people. Comments like this are just insecurity about SEO as a discipline and its effectiveness for a particular business.
Read the whole post. Lee even gives you 6 bonus myths, one better than another.
Right on. The sites that tend to place well in the search engines are those where the lawyers (or webmaster) are adding fresh, interesting content every day. No matter how the various engines' algorithms change (and that's why tricking the engines can get you essentially blacklisted) fresh content wins the day.
Like most other lawyer marketing, most lawyers are lazy. They don't want to learn SEO for themselves and they find it easier to just right a big check.
Big mistake.
Of course, it helps if the lawyer has some way to add that fresh content every day without calling his webmaster...a good website should have some sort of content management system so that edits can be made quickly and for free.
Second point. I laugh each time one of the vendors from those major law firm web "directories" comes and tells me that consumers don't use search engine.. that they go to Find***.com or Law***.com.. This just isn't true. 65% of consumers go to Google, with Yahoo and MSN slightly behind that.
If your site doesn't place well on Google, its just invisible.
Sorry Kevin, my take would be that great content with SEO beats great content without SEO.
Be wary not to lump metatag con artists in with those who know search marketing. If I understand a lawyers practice and business objectives, and can then tell that lawyer exactly what the most frequently searched phrases are in Google, that's valuable.
There's also the factor of knowing what the 'actionable phrases' are that drive leads to service based businesses online. Some online content can drive big traffic and low lead response, while other web content can be a gold mine for new files. Sometimes this is trial-and-error, but sometimes that success can be replicated.
And finally, don't discount the number of websites (& blogs too) that are making mistakes with SEO fundamentals. Web developers are notorious for building five & six figure websites, and then running with little or no support for online marketing.
I can see *some* SEO being outsourced, but a good SEO will set the fundamentals in place, do the grunt work where possible, help strategize, and then show their client how to work effectively online.
Agree clearly with you Steve that "SEO beats great content without SEO."
I did not mean to diss good SEO. Heck we work hard on it at LexBlog with all our client blogs. Meant to just refer to some of the myths of seo. My fault that I may have created some confusion with this post.
And boy do I like your comment Steve that learning some SEO and doing the grunt can work wonders for law firms. Just worked with client this afternoon on exactly that - trying to teach them effective SEO. My hope is that our clients will know as much about SEO as many of the 'seo experts' who come calling on them.
No confusion Kevin. I misread, your post reads fine the second time through. :-)