Setting up a content plan for your SEO campaign is very important and easy to do. Simply put: make sure the keywords for your campaign appear on your website. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, it is. Just make sure to weave your keywords into your content as best as possible and prove to the search engines that your content is relevant for the phrases that you are targeting.

Our role as an SEO team is to make sure that your website’s content is properly optimized. We understand that the content on your site is extremely important. Like the design of your site, it is a reflection of you and your firm.

The question then becomes, how aggressively do you want your SEO team to optimize your site? Would you say, “I could care less what my content says, I want to rank high no matter what,” or would you say, “My brand is more important than SEO. I don’t want to see keywords anywhere”? Or are you somewhere in between?

Using a scale like the one below, your SEO team should find out what option best suits your needs:

I could care less what the content says, I want to rank high no matter what.
(Title tags, headlines, subheads, content editing, footer, and alt tags will all change.)
Edit away, I want to see high rankings.
(Edit title tags, headlines, content, footer, and alt tags.)
I want a mix of solid SEO and solid aesthetics.
(Edit title tags, headlines, alt tags, footer, and potentially some content.)
My brand is more important than SEO.
(Edit title tags, alt tags and footer. Do not touch my content.)
I don’t want to see keywords anywhere.
(Edit title tags only. Under no circumstances should you touch our content or design.)

Typically, the default position is #3, a mix of solid SEO and solid aesthetics. Specifically, your SEO team should optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, header, footer, and weave your keyword phrases into your content.

Decide what approach best fits you and what plan of attack will help build the relevancy back to your website.

Many times over the years we have heard that question asked by our clients, who are usually non-technical professionals such as attorneys, consultants, accountants, etc… Here are the basics to help you gain some understanding of a Content Management System (CMS) and how it functions within a website.

First of all, it is important to know that a website consists of pages coded in a language such as HTML, PHP, and usually a combination of both. It also uses CSS. If you are not familiar with these languages, you will not be able to modify the code that comprises your website.

A Content Management System or “CMS” as it is usually abbreviated, is a computer application that allows you to manage the content of your law firm’s web site without having to modify the code itself.

CMS’ are targeted towards non-technical users. Most require no in-depth knowledge of programming languages and are relatively simple to use. In addition, using a CMS is completely web-based, so there is no software installation that needs to be done on your local computer. The secure admin log in can be accessed through any computer, at any location, as long as you have internet access.

It is important to note that there are some limitations as to what elements you can control through your CMS, without knowledge of a programming language.

Just because a lawyer’s website is “launched” on the web, doesn’t mean it will be rocketed up to #1 in Google! This is why SEO (search engine optimization) companies will charge thousands of dollars to run search engine campaigns. Even still, this is marketing we’re talking about and there are no hard guarantees that campaigns will be a success and get a website tons of new clients.

So, what is a newly-licensed lawyer who doesn’t have thousands of dollars for website marketing campaigns to do? This is a question I answer all the time for our clients.

While the search engines and directories (Yahoo is a directory, Google is a search engine) have tons of criteria they use to rank web sites, there are a number of, “tried and true” tactics that don’t cost an arm and a leg and will help potential clients find your law firm’s web site.

1) Make sure you have title, meta and alt tags that are search-related (having key phrases or words you believe people would use to find your website). This we often do for our clients just as a courtesy. The client can provide specific terms they want to include on each page or we can create those based on our experience with doing this sort of thing.

2) Add an xml sitemap to your web site. This is also something we provide as a standard service for clients. An xml sitemap is something that search engine robots “read” in order to index all the pages on your website.

2) Run a small Google Adwords campaign. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly to bring in some targeted traffic to your site. And Adwords still seems to be the fastest way to get your law firm’s site into Google. The main issue with running a campaign is that it will take time to go through the Adwords “training” on the Google site, figure out your initial key phrases, design the campaigns, set up your budget and then admin to the campaigns for several months to see which phrases are doing the best for you. Over time though it can really pay off in SEO benefits and get you some great targeted visitors to your web site.

3) Set up Google Analytics to see your website’s sources of traffic, what pages are the most popular, etc. It’s free to sign up at http://analytics.google.com. Once set up, you can log into the Analytics site and see some very useful stats about traffic and visitors.

4) Social Media. Get Facebook and Twitter running and start interacting with people, and even other lawyers. This is another thing that, over time, can really help your law practice with overall online marketing.

5) Blogging. This can still affect your “natural” (natural, meaning you didn’t do any pay-per-click with Google Adwords, etc.) search engine and directory listings over time. When you start posting legal articles to your website that contain some of the key phrases that your clients might search for these pages get indexed over time.

All of these tips will not cost you thousands of dollars if you do them on your own but it is important to remember that they take time to be effective. And of course the other option is that we can always assist our clients with their online marketing needs!
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Hybrid Design might NOT be the author of this article but found and got approval to re-post to the site for the benefit and mental enrichment of all who view it! If you have an article you would like to see in the Hybrid Design blog, contact us and let us know.