New York Lawyers Success Blog

I might be wrong but I think most lawyers don’t understand the importance of good legal link building strategies. To really understand the process myself, I’ve been learning from my own trusted sources. Because I know SEO and SEM (search engine optimization and search engine marketing), I’ve decided to do my own link building (on my sites and a few other lawyer sites) to really understand the process and see how to do it right. It’s tedious and time consuming and there are no short cuts.

I see many lawyers hiring SEO & link building companies that are linking to poor quality and irrelevant websites (link farms will link to just about anything) that use black hat techniques. Linking to lousy quality and completely off topic/irrelevant websites will not help your rankings and may even hurt them. You want make sure that you’re getting quality links that are legal-related or relevant to your practice location.

Foster Web Marketing, which does law firm and attorney SEO and Internet marketing, blogs about the topic. Blogger George Murphy talks about link building and asks…

So who do you hire to handle your link building?

George gives these few options and Foster Web Marketing’s opinions on each:

1) Should you use a Paralegal or Junior Attorney in your office do it?

According to George, this seems to be the most popular decision when it comes to routine link building jobs like submitting to directories and article distribution, but it takes a lot of time and effort to get assitants and paralegals with no experience to know enough about SEM and SEO.  Even if they are trained will they be able to do an effective job (as a qualified expert would) to increase your web search engine rankings?

George goes on to say that they’ve seen that using paralegals or assitants to perform these tasks leads to a high turnover rate, because they’d rather be doing more involving the legal aspects of the law firm (which, as George puts it, is what they went to school for) or because the law firm finally sees after a few months that they aren’t web marketing experts.

2) Can your Traditional Marketing consultant(s) handle link building strategies?

Most firms and small law offices use traditonal marketing consultants (whether it be in-house or not) that they can go to for many of their “traditional” marketing needs. These maketing professionals must know enough about search engine optimization and search engine marketing (SEO and SEM) to do most of it themselves, right?

Well, according to George, that depends. From our experience, the marketing consultants are excellent for specific aspects of Internet marketing, such as helping with important social media tasks, being the contact people for online press releases, and basically assisting lawyers since they’re just too busy. But from our experience most traditional marketers don’t know enough about SEM and SEO to create, build and maintain effective link building strategies. Of course there are some exceptions, but from our experience the traditional marketers seem to make better project managers who can analyze and measure the SEO and SEM effectiveness than actually handling link building as do’ers”.

3) How about hiring a freelance SEO/SEM consultant?

This seems to be another very popular choice when it comes to getting someone to handle your link building. There are hundreds of people you can find on places like Craigslist and freelance websites such as Elance, but a word of caution here. Be sure to check out other websites they’ve handled reagarding SEO and SEM, and see how those websites rank and what links  (back links) they have.

Hiring an effective and skilled freelancer is a good option, but sometimes turnaround plays a part (especially if the freelancer takes on too much work or ends up taking a full-time job and all of a sudden doesn’t have time to work on your project) as does measuring success.

4) What About Hiring an Offshore Internet Marketing Company?

You most likely get contacted all the time by companies (from India and other countries overseas) that will promise you page one rankings at a low monthly fee. Labor in these countries is very cheap and, just like other business, outsourcing your link building and SEO to an overseas vendor can be very tempting, especially if they can show positive results for other clients and can be hundreds or thousands of dollars cheaper than a company here in the US.

The problems are the language barrier between you and the company and also the errors with grammar that can show up as they provide their link building services on press release and article submission sites, blogs, etc. And if you think you can proof read everything – that can cost you more time than it’s worth.

Another problem is that most offshore companies use poor quality link building – black hat techniques. These are “crappy” back links that usually have nothing to do with legal businesses or your location. You may not really care about this at first when you’re getting great rankings on page one of Google, but your site will be penalized if search engines find out with these poor quality sites lining back to yours and you’ll be stuck with these loust results after paying for link building services that ended up hurting your website more than they helped.

5) Hiring a Web Marketing Company

This is the most expensive option, but it’s usually also the most effective. Making sure you hire proven and trained link building professionals to handle your SEM and link building strategies provides a return on investment that most of the other options do not.

You understand how very important your website search engine rankings are, and building quality and relevant links is key to obtaining and keeping these rankings.

Having a skilled web marketing company on your side also pays off when you need Internet marketing consulting, such as whether or not certain PPC or other paid advertising opportunities out there are worth the investment, what kind of marketing strategies they can put in place to increase traffic conversion, referral opportunities, networking and more.

There is power in numbers and most Internet marketing companies already have the resources in place to make your link building and SEM campaign a success, and help you generate more cases, leads, and most of all, money.

Foster Web Marketing

Information courtesy of George Murphy

George Murphy is the Web Marketing manager for Foster Web Marketing, the leader in website design for attorneys and attorney web marketing. To find out more visit fosterwebmarketing.com

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