Pick one phrase and win it
Not a list of thirty keywords. The single phrase your best clients type when they are ready to hire, in your city.
Law firms
Search work for law firms that are losing to a directory
In the market we studied, eleven of the first forty results were not law firms at all. They were lists. Most of them are free to join and most firms never have.
The problem is rarely the firm
It is almost always the page and the links.
Legal search has a shape that is unusual and worth understanding, because it is where the opportunity is.
Directories got there first and got there properly. Justia, FindLaw, Avvo, Super Lawyers, Martindale, LawInfo, Expertise and the Better Business Bureau are all enormous sites with pages written specifically for your city and your practice area. They will always be there. But they are also lists, and a list has room for you on it.
The firms losing to them are usually losing for a reason that takes an afternoon to fix. A homepage title that says the firm's own name and nothing about what it does. A practice area buried in a drop down menu with no page behind it. A site with no main heading at all. We found all three repeatedly in a single Kentucky city.
What we do for a firm
Four things, in this order.
Make the site say it
Title, heading, a real page for the practice area, and your name, address and phone in a form Google can read.
Join the lists that already rank
Your profile on the directories currently holding page one for your own term, plus bar and chamber listings.
Then count fourteen days
We check every morning. The invoice only exists after fourteen consecutive days on page one.
Questions firms ask
We already pay for a legal directory listing. Is that not the same thing?
It is close to the opposite. A directory listing puts you on a page the directory owns and sells the same visitor to three other firms. Ranking your own site means the visitor arrives at you and nobody else was paid for it.
Our marketing is handled by the firm's web company.
Then hand them our findings. The market check is free and it is written so a web person can act on it directly. If they fix it and you rank, you owe us nothing and we will have been useful for free.
Is this going to get our site penalised?
Nobody outside Google can promise you that, and treat anyone who does with suspicion. What we can tell you is exactly what we do, so you can judge it. The listings we build are the directories and professional bodies that already hold page one for your own search term, plus your bar association and chamber. We vary the wording rather than repeating one phrase, and we do not buy links. There is nothing here you would be uncomfortable explaining to a client.
We take one firm per practice area per city.
Ask which of ours are still open in your city.