By Tom Foster
Before reading this article, go to an Internet search engine — Google, MSN, Yahoo, any one will do — and type in a keyword or phrase that describes one of your firm's primary practice areas. Hit the search button and wait for the results.
Is your firm's home page appearing in the top 30 sites returned for the keyword you entered? If not, then your firm may be missing out on an increasingly important potential client resource — Internet search engines.
Maybe you're happy with your site and you aren't too concerned about good search engine results. Your firm may already have all the name recognition you desire, and your primary interest is using your site to bolster and complement the already established image and reputation your firm has built over the years.
Referral-based firms with discreet and specialized clientele know that prospective clients won't choose their legal representation based on a search engine return. For such firms, conveying a professional image and reassuring record of practice to existing clients might be more critical than designing the website for the high visibility required to capture more business.
But for firms with practice areas focused on the needs and concerns of everyday people (personal injury, medical malpractice, tax and insurance laws, to name a few) optimizing their website for competitive search engine rankings can be the critical difference in marketing their practice areas and increasing their client base.
The public's use of search engines is quickly supplanting the Yellow Pages as a first-step reference tool for seeking information. Reliance on search engines continues to increase geometrically each year. The latest figures show that more than 2 billion manual keyword searches were conducted in 2002.
While the public's use of search engines will continue to expand, there is one fact that probably won't change: Web searchers will not look past the first 30 listings of search results.
Any sites that don't make it within the critical first 30 returns go largely ignored by the browsing public.
It's where you say it
Search engine returns are not random and they don't happen by accident. When a user enters a keyword, the search engine applies evaluation criteria to a page to determine where it ranks in returns. It "reads" your page to weigh the relevance of the user's keyword search to your website's content.
When you performed your keyword search earlier, the sites that returned in the top 30 got high rankings because they have designed their site content against the search engine's criteria.
Firms that get the most exposure on search engines do so through web page optimization. By designing their pages around specific and popular keywords and phrases and placing those keywords in strategic areas (both on the visual page and in the code that creates the web page image), a website scores better against search engine evaluation criteria and ranks higher in results.
Optimizing your web page isn't easy. Competition is fierce and each search engine has a myriad of evaluating factors it uses to rank your site, with those factors changing frequently.
Staying on top of the shifting factors of evaluation is time consuming, as is applying and updating those changes to your website to maintain a consistently high presence on the search engine. But the up side of having a site that ranks well are numerous. Most important is the opportunity for free advertising and the increase in website traffic, resulting in more potential clients.
If you aren't satisfied with your current website and want to do more to maximize its web presence and use as a marketing tool, you should begin by asking yourself two basic questions:
"Does this site emphasize who our firm is? Or does this site emphasize the legal services we offer?"
Random web users seeking information on services your firm offers will always be more interested in the second question than the first. You should write and design the content of your site accordingly.
Tom Foster is Technical Director of Casamo & Associates, an Alexandria-based company with more than 20 years of experience integrating technical solutions with comprehensive legal services. He can be reached at tom@casamo.com. The Casamo & Associates website is: www.casamo.com
February 24, 2003
