Independent law firm marketing lessons
Entrepreneurship takes a lot of information and a lot of hard work. When you work for a large company, they do a pretty good job organically marketing your skills. For instance, if you work for a respectable law firm, then you are verified by that company. After all, you must be pretty savvy to get a job there.
When you launch an independent law firm, you have no such marketing apparatus behind you. It is up to you to convince potential clients that you have the talent and the knowledge to provide a solution to their problem. Proving yourself is not easy, but it is doable.
One way to market yourself and your solo law firm is through search engine optimization (SEO); however, SEO has changed over the past few years. You want to make sure you are positioning yourself as an expert instead of using shortcuts that will actually hurt your search rankings.
Cloaking
The book Digital Marketing remarks about one such shortcut:
There is a practice called cloaking, where Web developers purposely try to attract people to their site by advertising content that isn’t there. For instance, if you own a car dealership, you would your company site to come up in search results when people search for car repair. Search engines hate cloaking.
Cloaking is just one of many unsavory SEO practices that is ineffective. The best way to be relevant is to create great content and avoid shortcuts. Build an audience, and establish your expertise, by providing readers and potential clients with quality, informative content.
Article spinning
Before Google’s 2011 Panda update, online marketers and webmasters would often find well-written articles online and post them on their own website, a practice known as “spinning.” To avoid being discovered for plagiarism, they would change a few words here and there, either by themselves or with the help of a machine. Spinning is now detectable by Google, not to mention unethical and a violation of copyright laws, so post original content on your website.
Paying for backlinks
Google will raise you up in their search engine if a lot of people link to your website. So, some websites started paying link farms, thousands of websites that link to other sites for SEO purposes, to link to them. Google’s 2012 Penguin update stopped people from doing that by applying the appropriate punitive measures whenever it was unearthed.
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