Search engine optimisation is often the first thing on the wish list for law firms hungry to advance up Google’s search rankings for their keywords and drive more traffic to their website. True, a good ranking greatly increases your exposure and can kick-start growth in a remarkable way.
The requirements for ranking highly are always changing as search engines evolve their algorithms to combat such tactics as keyword stuffing, filling pages with keywords to ‘fool’ search engines into higher rankings, or creating link farms that generate thousands of links to paying websites. With each of these examples, Google and the other search engines have tweaked their algorithms to heavily penalise or even ban websites that fall foul of their changing standards.
Bad SEO for law firms can seriously harm your page ranking!
There are two important messages when it comes to outsourcing legal SEO. In an ever-changing field, it’s more important than ever to have a professional law firm SEO expert conduct your optimisation activities – if not you could find your website mysteriously losing huge rankings or even disappearing from Google’s index overnight. The consistent effort and expertise it takes to monitor your website and keep it in line with current trends is something you can’t afford to underestimate.
The second message is simply to alert you to the fact that, with SEO for law firms, there exist SEO “experts” with very dubious techniques that might offer you great short-term gains only to massively, and irreplaceably, harm your website’s reputation with Google in the long term. When outsourcing, ask about the techniques that will be applied to your website and make sure they are ethical. SEO can be a long process and if you are promised an overnight ranking that seems too good to be true, chances are it will be achieved through crooked methods that will eventually cripple your law firm website and online reputation.
To discuss your options for safe and ethical law firm SEO, call Quinn Wilson Associates on 0208 956 2242 or request a free website review by one of our experts.
