Once again, if you haven't considered building an internet presence for your law firm, or don't think it is important, think again. An internet presence can do three things for you easily and cheaply that can't be done anywhere else:
(1) establish you as an expert in your niche;Assuming you've already followed my earlier advice and started a law firm blog and started optimizing your law blog for Google, you may notice that people still aren't finding your site. Or that it is taking a long time and you still can't even find your site on Google. The reason for this is that the way that Google determines which pages it puts at the top has a little bit to do with optimizing your blog, but it has a lot to do with a separate factor called backlinks.
(2) build a relationship of trust with your clients before they meet with you (everyone checks the web now for information); and
(3) provide a marketing vehicle that is quickly overtaking all others out there.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are a term of art meaning all of the links from other sites pointing to your site. I think I touched on this briefly in one of my last posts by emphasizing the need to link to previous blog posts whenever you put up a new post. This provides backlinks to your older posts (which are separate webpages and will show up on Google as their own page) free and easy. The reason Google loves backlinks for determining the ranking of pages on its site is simple: Google is interested in content. They want to make sure the sites that provide the information people are looking for are highest up on its pages.Google has figured out that one of the best ways to do this is to see how many links a particular web site has pointing to it, and looking at the keywords embedded in the link. The more links a site has pointing to it with relevant keywords, the more authority it must have out there in the real world. This is important for your law firm marketing efforts, because the more people see you, the better.
Let's look at this site, "How to Start a Law Firm," as an example. Google crawls this site every once in a while to see what the content is and what the keywords are to try to find out what it is about. By scanning, it can find out that this site is most likely about how to start a law firm. But then as I've gotten links (both by building them myself, and through others), Google becomes sure of what my site is about, and becomes more confident that I know what I'm talking about (why would people link to me if I wasn't saying anything interesting?).
Certain sites have linked to me that are law sites, and the link to my site says some variation of "how to start a law firm." Google then assumes I have some authority on this and puts me near the top of the rankings. Right now I rank #7 on Google for how to start a law firm. The same would be true with a site providing divorce advice for men, how to stop wage garnishment, or any other information relating to the law.
To take it one step further, after Google crawls this post it will probably start to think I am moving toward law firm marketing. It has seen phrases like law firm marketing, how to market your law firm, building a law firm internet presence, and information on how to get legal clients from the internet. Pretty soon it will start thinking that this is what this site is about and start ranking me high for that search term.
If you can't tell by now, backlinks are the key to getting your legal website or blog traffic. You want Joe Citizen to type into Google Seattle DUI attorney and have your site come up number one (the first spot gets something on the average of 60% of clicks - it pays to be number 1).
Now that you know how important backlinks are to your success as an internet lawyer marketer, the next question should be, how do I get backlinks to my law blog or website? The answer to that question will come next.
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