Featured image by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
In order to understand the development of law firm SEO, it’s best to start at the beginning. What is SEO? How does it work? How has it changed over time? And how does law firm SEO differ from SEO for other verticals? In this post we dive in for a deeper look.
RELATED ARTICLE: 3 DIGITAL MARKETING TIPS FOR YOUR BUSINESS IN A CHANGING WORLD
What Is SEO?
These days, SEO for law firms, as well as SEO for companies in other industries, revolves around content. However, in the past it was geared toward the technical side of things. When Google first launched, for example, they ranked pages based on keyword frequency. Moreover, they had few restrictions.
Before long, black hat SEO companies began to take advantage of the situation. Accordingly, these nefarious entities began to build website pages solely for the purpose of manipulating Google rankings. Their sites were of little use to any legitimate businesses. One of the techniques they favored—and often still try to practice today—is called keyword stuffing.
What Is Keyword Stuffing?
Keyword stuffing refers to the overuse of keywords for the express purpose of manipulating a site’s Google rankings. It’s easy for human beings to spot a site that does this, as the text is unnatural and not like human speech at all. Today, Google bots can spot it, too.
How Is Law Firm SEO Different?
To stay on pace with the developments in law firm SEO, it is important to understand the technology’s underpinnings. This is because knowing about digital marketing trends can help experts predict upcoming changes for marketing in every vertical.
Many of the changes with SEO, for law firms and for companies in other industries, are tied to the ever-expanding sophistication of Google bots and the engineers who design them. For example, as scientists study how machines learn, marketers obtain deeper understanding of SEO. As designers creatively modernize web design, web masters gain greater skill. And as marketers learn more about how people use the internet, they improve their competency with using Big Data.
RELATED ARTICLE: BIG DATA: 6 WAYS LEARNING TO USE IT WILL HELP YOUR BUSINESS
Moreover, advances in machine learning mean that Google bots now look for more than specific keywords. Specifically, they now search for keywords that are related to the core word. This is a new development that engineers are still researching.
Some may believe the changing landscape can make it difficult to track SEO and other digital marketing indicators for their law firms. However, the truth is that lawyers now have more ability than ever to get involved with their marketing efforts.
What Is the State of Law Firm SEO Today?
While some keyword stuffers are still out there, they are hanging by a thread. This is because Google intends to stay relevant as a business. To this end, they have updated their keyword searching software multiple times. These updates make Google more and more sophisticated each time. Today, Google stays well ahead of the black hat practitioners, and their engineers make a sport of playing whack-a-mole with shady operators the web.
Today’s Google search algorithms will quickly mark down websites evil-doers create. They’re easy to identify, as they are obviously made for the sole purpose of creating backlinks with little regard for user experience. At their worst, they sabotage legitimate websites.
For law firm SEO, this means attorneys can confidently invest in quality content for their websites. Moreover, this is precisely the best approach to SEO any law firm can take.
RELATED ARTICLE: CONTENT CREATION TIPS: HOW TO CREATE QUALITY CONTENT THAT GOOGLE LOVES
