On Page Optimization

Legal SEO Costs: What Are You Really Paying For?

Posted on November 15, 2019December 21, 2023 by apricotlaw

Law firms spend a lot of money to run their businesses. The trick is to minimize your costs as much as possible. To do that, you need to know which services you really need to run your business. If you are paying for an search engine optimization (SEO) company to help you market your law firm business, you may be unsure about where your money is going.

Your law firm SEO company handles a lot of marketing and other tasks for you. For instance, they may run your website, handle your social media accounts, handle PPC, write your website’s content, and handle your SEO efforts.

That’s a lot of tasks your company handles for you. It takes a lot of professionals to take care of all of your internet marketing for you. Your SEO company has law firm website designer, developers, professional writers, social media managers, and more—all working for you.

Where Does Your Internet Marketing Budget Go?

It’s wise to keep track of your money. You won’t have a strong, growing business if you don’t keep a careful budget. Here’s where your money is going when you pay an SEO company to handle your internet marketing.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

You will likely be getting some online advertising in your internet marketing plan. Part of your budget will go to the ads themselves. SEO companies often have a PPC manager who handles your PPC budget and advertising goals. You won’t have to worry about online advertising because your internet marketing company is handling that on your behalf.

Professional Writers

You aren’t writing your website content, social media content, newsletters, and outreach articles. The professional writers at your internet marketing company are writing those things for you. These writers have degrees in writing, and they know what they’re doing. You don’t have to write content because someone else is doing it for you.

Website Design and Development

Designing and running a website is not easy. That’s why you pay an internet marketing company to do these challenging tasks for you. The designers create a beautiful, custom website for you that helps you grow your business. They will make your firm look professional and help convert website visitors into leads.

The developers will make everything function and will fix issues when they crop up. Keeping a website up and running is something you probably don’t have time to do.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Getting your law firm to rank is one of the most challenging tasks of all. Your internet marketing company has a team of people dedicated to seeing your law firm reach the top of the search engine results pages. These team members obtain backlinks for you and constantly work on new strategies to keep your firm at the top.

Reach Out to a Law Firm Internet Marketing Company

Contact ApricotLaw through the form down below or call 877-203-0751. You can receive a free website analysis and learn how our company can help you grow yours.

Small Law Firm SEO: What Attorneys Need to Know

Posted on October 10, 2019December 21, 2023 by apricotlaw

If you run a small law firm, your goal is probably the same as your larger competition—to grow your firm and get more clients. But that doesn’t mean your approach to online marketing is the same.

As a smaller firm, your budget for marketing is likely going to be much smaller than that of a large firm. You will have to be more careful in deciding where you spend your marketing funds.

There are many things you need to know about in order to successfully grow your small law firm. You probably want to receive consistent leads, but how do you do that? How do you successfully market your small law firm online without breaking the bank?

How to Set Your Small Law Firm Apart

There are many different approaches for building a successful marketing campaign online. Since yours is a small firm, you may want to focus on these four things if you hope to grow your firm and increase your online visibility.

Focus Your Practice Area

Some firms have many different practice areas, but this can present a challenge to your internet marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. Google and other search engines like websites that are focused on one area. They want to see that you are an expert in your field.

If you are trying to rank your small law firm online, it’s a good idea to pick one practice area to focus on. For instance, even though you might take a few criminal cases, if you mostly take family law cases, it’s probably best to focus your website on family law content.

Google rewards those who seem like experts in their fields. This means you will typically enjoy a boost in the rankings department.

Know Your Market and Where Your Clients Are Coming From

You might need to do more research than a larger firm. The larger firm can hire out or pay for partnerships, but you might not be able to afford to do that. You will need to look into where your clients are coming from and invest in the right marketing strategies.

For instance, if you are a personal injury firm and get a lot of clients from car accidents, make sure you focus your online marketing on car accident ads. Also focus on increasing your SEO efforts in an effort to catch car accident victims.

You can do this by answering questions online about car wrecks and creating content for landing pages or supporting web pages that focuses on what car accident victims go through. You can always take other case types when your firm has grown larger.

Don’t Put All of Your Marketing Money in One Place

It’s probably obvious, but you should never put all of your marketing money in one place. If your firm is not yet ranking organically on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), you might want to work on building up your legal directory profile or working on your Google My Business page.

Consider Partnering with a Law Firm SEO Company

Finally, you might want to consider partnering with a law firm SEO company that specializes in internet marketing. ApricotLaw can often work with your smaller budget to come up with a marketing approach that will work for you. Call 877-203-0751 or fill out the contact form on this page to receive a free website analysis.

Organic Rankings vs. PPC for Law Firms

Posted on June 24, 2019December 21, 2023 by apricotlaw

Ranking for your law firm website is vital to getting legal clients. You want your site to be as visible as possible to potential clients, so you need to push your site to page one on Google search results, seeking the top spots for your industry and area keywords. However, you might not be sure what the best option for you is.

When it comes down to organic rankings vs. PPC for law firms, you may not be sure what the best option is for your unique firm. However, figuring this out can make a real difference in your rankings and help you get the traffic your advertisements and, more importantly, your website need.

What Is PPC?

When you want to improve your law firm SEO rankings online, you might be looking at the ads at the top of most search engines. These ads are close to the top, giving them some visibility over pages when they otherwise wouldn’t rank so highly.

PPC, or pay-per-click, puts your ad on the page for a small fee per visitor, or click. So, when they click on your ad, you’ll pay a small fee for the ad. While you’ll be paying a little in the long run, however, getting visitors to your site can be invaluable. While a click may cost you a few dollars, a successful client can net you far more than what you spent on PPC.

However, people may not be as likely to select an ad vs. an organic search result. While ads will receive some traffic, relying on PPC alone may not get you all the traffic you need to convert more visitors to clients. While you may want to take advantage of ad placement, there are other ways to get your brand out there.

Organic Rankings Look Natural

While ads can help you gain more traffic that you otherwise might not have had, organic rankings are still important. While ads will appear at the top of the page, many people will focus on the first five search results on the page, not the ads.

When you’re seeking more leads, getting your site into one of the top spots can help you gain more traffic and convert more visitors into leads. These rankings will also look more natural, which appeals to many viewers—some people may not click the ads just because they’re ads. Instead, they’ll look for an authority site at the top of the page to look at. Bonus points if you appear in both places!

Organic search result rankings can be improved through a variety of approaches, including strategic website design, on-page SEO, consistent blogging, and much more.

Choose the Best Ranking Option for Your Law Firm

When you’re trying to rank for your search terms, looking at only your organic rankings or your PPC campaign may not be enough. When used together, they can be a powerful way to boost your traffic and get the attention of potential clients.

When you’re seeking to improve your rankings and reach a wider audience, you’ll need to balance both options. That’s where a lawyer-centered SEO company like ApricotLaw can help you find the right balance between organic rankings and PPC for your law firm.

If you aren’t sure where to start in terms of organic rankings vs. PPC for law firms, speak to us about your options. Our law firm website SEO experts can be reached at 212-202-3214, or you can contact us through the online form on this page.

Finding the Right Call to Action for Your Law Firm Website

Posted on June 24, 2019December 21, 2023 by apricotlaw

When you set up your law firm, you probably knew you would need to create a website to help people find you. Most attorneys know that their law firm’s website will need to contain certain kinds of information, such as a section about the firm or a results page where potential clients can read about your success.

There are many different things that should be included in your website’s content so that you can take site visitors and convert them into leads. Sure, your website should contain some useful information that addresses the concerns your potential clients are facing, but there are other content items that need to be addressed on your website, as well.

One of the most important things that must be included in your content is a call to action.

What Is a Call to Action?

A call to action (CTA) is a sentence or a line of text that tells your readers what action or steps they should take after looking at your website. If you simply provide a lot of great resources for them to browse through, but you don’t include a CTA, your potential clients may not know what to do next.

Why Is a Call to Action Important?

In the case of a law firm website, a call to action tells your readers that they can contact you to obtain the legal services you are able to provide them. The CTA is important because the people visiting your website need to know where to contact you, how to contact you, and what benefits they will receive by doing so.

How Should You Word Your CTA?

There is no one way to word a call to action, but there are several key items you should always include, and you should be specific about the action you want them to take.

You should point to the method by which they can contact you. If you want them to call you, point out or list the phone number. If you want them to fill out a form, you can tell them where it can be found on the website.

You may want to tell them why it benefits them to reach out to your law firm. Do you offer free case reviews? Let them know in your call to action why it’s a good idea for them to get ahold of your firm sooner rather than later.

Finally, you should include the name of your firm in the CTA. Even if they don’t call you right away, the firm’s name may stick in their brain, and they may look up your firm’s name later.

Reach Out to a Law Firm SEO Company to Get Your Law Firm to the Top

A call to action is an important bit of content that should be included on your law firm’s website. If you forget to include a CTA, your website visitors may be unclear what steps they should take next.

ApricotLaw provides website design, content creation, and SEO marketing for law firms across the country. If you need assistance building your law firm’s website and getting it to the top in the rankings department, reach out to our firm now. We offer a free website analysis to those who call 212-202-3214 or who fill out the internet submission form at the bottom of this page.

In case you didn’t notice, the above is a call to action. Snuck it right in there. We’re that good.

Was Penquin and Hummingbird the Death of Lawyer EMD’s?

Posted on February 24, 2014December 20, 2023 by apricotlaw

In dozens of cases I have witnessed the exact match domain getting crushed in the SERPs as a direct result of the most recent Google Update, Penguin 2.1.

Instead of the homepage ranking, a relevant inner page ranks somewhere deep in the Google results pages.

Also worth noting that the best fit inner page is usually not the one ranking highest. For example, let’s say we are trying to rank for Lawyer SEO. The page ranking highest (albeit on page 9) is www.lawyer-seo-firm.com/law-firm-website-design… while http://lawyer-seo-firm.com/lawyer-seo is no where to be found.

Regardless of what is ranking, the homepages of many exact match domains are not ranking on page one anymore. In fact they are not found at all and are now being replaced by the lower ranking of some inner page on the site for the same keyword.

What does this tell us?

Google is moving towards ranking the inner pages of Authority Websites.

Exact Match Domain, or EMD, is a tactic that got over-used and has now been deemed less effective.

What can you do about it?

Stick to the fundamentals.

Never rely on one SEO tactic, diversify. It does not matter if the tactic is considered White Hat or Black Hat. Once it gets abused, you can count on Google discrediting it.

One tactic that comes to mind that Google has warned about is guest posting. Very effective right now but like every other tactic, it won’t be as effective in the future.

What works today may not work tomorrow.

Build an authority website.

On page SEO, and proper website structure, is more important than it used to be… as important as quality of backlinks right now.

https://www.staging.https://www.apricotlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Lawyer-SEO-1.jpg.com/lawyer-seo/law-firm-seo-checklist/

I can here you now, “Nick, you are full of it!” (Maybe you even cursed… I am trying to keep it clean here).

You have a legal website that happens to have a keyword in the name and it’s still on page one?

Yes, there are exceptions to every rule.

So, which EMDs survived Penguin 2.1?

From our research it looks like sites that are properly structured and have a good amount of relevant content on them, were not harmed.

Like I said above, proper website structure is as important as quality of backlinks right now. Furthermore, if your website is properly structured, the fact that the keyword is in the domain, was overlooked.

Penguin 2.1 was more about the structure and usability of your website than anything else.

I should also add that any OVER-optimization will get you nowhere. And I am not just talking about anchor text. Everyone knows that anchor text over-optimization will get you slapped.

(Most people see a slap as a severe penalty brought down on their website by the Google Police. It is much more effective to think of Google as a filter. Over-optimization of anchor text, as an example, will simply not get you through the filter that the user is entering into the search bar.)

In addition to anchor text, meta titles and meta descriptions (you know the listing information that visitors see in Google results) must also be crafted with care. Put your target keyword there over and over and that too will get your website caught in the sifter.

How do you pass through the filter to the promised land?

Use synonyms
Never use the same exact phrase more than once (within reason)
Focus on using the words of your target phrase in different order
Focus primarily on getting the reader to notice your headline (meta title) and then curious enough to click your listing after reading the description. Click-through and user behavior is becoming increasingly important to Google.
H1 and H2 tags still tell Google what terms are important on your page. Just keep the previous points in mind when crafting them.

Have you seen your Lawyer Exact Match Domain take a nose dive in the Google rankings?

Tell us about it.

You don’t have to tell us the domain name. Just let me know I’m not crazy and my eyes are not deceiving me.

Or if you see something different happening and you think I am way off here, please let me know that too.

Have a great day!