Online marketing for law firms can be done either through a paid method, such as pay-per-click ads, or through an organic method, such as naturally helping a website rise in search engine ranking positions (SERPs). In just about every case, improving your own website to attract more visitors will win out when compared to paying for visitors on search engines.

How Organic Search Results Work

In order for your website to rank highly in the SERPs, there are three basic things you need to pay attention to:

• Content
• Search engine optimization
• Other related websites

Of these, the content of your website has the most to do with how well your site will rank when a user searches for a specific term. The content on your site needs to match up with what the search engine thinks will help the user the most. Keeping the scope of your content limited to what people are searching for will make your site appealing to the search engines, and to your visitors. Giving a visitor a piece of information they need is what organic search results are all about, the better you can do that, the more of a chance your website will be the first thing a search engine user sees.

How well your website is optimized for search engines plays a significant part in how high up in the results page your website will appear. Sites that are inter-linked well, and that reference other on-site pages, will typically fare better than sites which are older or that are missing some of the basics of good SEO. Other websites linking to your website are helpful as well, though the importance of this has decreased in recent years since it became popular to just sell links on popular websites to help with SEO.

The only thing you cannot control is what other websites are doing. If older, more established websites are offering the exact same information, you will need to do a lot more to have your website appear on top of theirs on a search engine results page. A good content marketing firm can take a look at what websites appear for the terms that you will be focusing on and develop a strategy based on how probable it is that your site can overtake theirs.

Why Organic Results are Better Than Paid Search

With a paid search strategy, you will be paying for every single person who visits your site. Some of these people may be looking to hire an attorney immediately, but many will just be on your site looking for information. While it is possible to target phrases like “how to hire an attorney”, you are going to pay a very high price (probably in the $XX range) for every click. If those visitors do not convert, you are going to lose a lot of money very quickly.

When you focus on more of an organic strategy, you are going to start getting people who are both interested in information, who may later turn into clients, as well as people looking to hire an attorney immediately. The content that you are creating will always be on your website, getting people’s attention for years, as opposed to the traffic through paid search, which will stop as soon as you stop paying the search engines money.

Over the long-term, focusing on organic results will win out overpaid advertising every time for attorneys. People are always going to have legal questions that need answering, when you have the information they need on your website, those people will come to you for help.

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