Good law blog content trumps SEO

How can good law blogs published by lawyers who don’t know about SEO (search engine optimization) rank well?

The answer comes from Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. And it’s simple. Good content.

From a recent video on the subject, here’s Cutts key points.

• Google tries to make it so you don’t have to do SEO and Google will still find and display the good content.
• Just because someone is not SEO savvy does not mean they don’t have good content.
• There are lot of things people can to do, ie, making content accessible, making it crawable, and having good titles, but that doesn’t mean they have good content.
• Even if you do brain dead things and shoot yourself in foot as far as SEO, Google will still want to return good content in search so people can find it. If there’s good quality content, Google tries to compensate if people make mistakes.
• If you put a little time into making sure your content is accessible and useful that will help, but Google does not want to penalize anyone if they don’t do every single thing on the SEO checklist.
• First and foremost Google cares about getting the stuff people really will like – the good and compelling content – in front of them.

Here’s Cutts video answer.

Thanks to technology professional, Joe Brockmeier, who turned me on to the video from Cutts in his post this morning at ReadWrite Enterprise entitled, ‘Good Content Trumps SEO.’

Brockmeir also raises a great point for lawyers and law firms.

So if you’re planning that 2012 site budget, you might want to think twice about hiring that SEO expert and find a content expert instead.

I see lawyers pay handsomely for SEO services. Two to three thousand dollars a month is not unusual.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that if you’re working with someone you can trust. Bottom line though, you are still going to need to good content.

If you’re a lawyer or law firm looking to get seen on Google, you may want to think about blogging in the coming year — and doing a good blog — as opposed to spending on SEO.