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Local Search Engine Marketing



Everything About Local Search Engine Marketing

When you're a smaller law firm, it's a good idea to focus your marketing efforts on small business search engine marketing.  This means working with local search engine marketing so that your business is noticed by local residents.  In this guide, you'll learn about several different strategies to enhance your small business search engine marketing plan, including several different types of local searches that can bring your firm new clients on a regular basis.

Designing Your Website for Local Search Engine Marketing

Before you start implementing your small business search engine marketing plan, you need to make sure that your website looks, runs, and feels the way you want it to.  Keep in mind that clients looking at a website for the first time can make up their minds not to hire your firm within moments.  If your firm's site hasn't been updated in years, contains links that go nowhere, or is riddled with spelling errors, it doesn't matter how many people click on your website, because most of them will just go elsewhere.

You may want to hire a website design firm that specializes in small business search engine marketing.  These firms may be able to make your local search engine marketing easier by offering you a web design package that includes a website, blog, and social media pages.  If your firm doesn't yet have a clear brand identity to differentiate it from other, similar law firms, you may want to focus on branding before rolling out your small business search engine marketing plan.

Video Small Business Search Engine Marketing

One of the best ways to make people who click on your website call your firm is to include video as well as text on your website.  Video small business search engine marketing doesn't have to be difficult.  Even a few basic videos that introduce you to potential clients and help them understand what your firm does can make a big difference to your conversion rates.

In order to make your local search engine marketing with video more effective, make sure your videos look professional and are hosted on reliable servers.  While working, polished video will attract clients, a broken video link is likely to make them look for another law firm with a fully functional website.

Client Reviews and Local Search Engine Marketing

Today's legal clients are more web savvy than ever, and they're using that acumen to search client reviews before they ever call a lawyer.  When you plan your small business search engine marketing strategies, you need to take these clients into account.  A number of sites exist for clients to review attorneys specifically, and even more are for all types of local businesses.

You can help to establish yourself through local search engine marketing by making sure any contact and basic firm information contained on these review pages is accurate and complete.  You may want to add to your page on one of these sites by including a link to your firm's website.  You can also encourage happy clients to help your firm by giving you a positive review, enhancing your small business search engine marketing strategy.

Some law firms, like other local businesses, are tempted to take a shortcut and write their own positive client reviews (or negative reviews for competing firms) in order to get better local search engine marketing results.  While this may seem like a good strategy in the short term, there can be significant consequences.  This is against the terms of service for most websites, and your firm could even be on the hook for damages if you post negative reviews about another firm as part of your local search engine marketing strategy.

It's important to keep an eye on client review websites to make sure that no defamatory reviews have been posted of your law firm.  Just a few bad reviews can sabotage your small business search engine marketing strategy.  You can usually contact a website to have a bad review removed, and if you don't have time to manage this part of your local search engine marketing, you may want to hire a reputation management firm to help you avoid the damage that a negative review can do to your reputation online.

Local Sources for Local Search Engine Marketing

One of the best ways to make sure that your small business search engine marketing is successful is to advertise on true local websites.  It can often be substantially cheaper to do your local search engine marketing by advertising on the websites for local newspapers, radio stations, and television stations than paying per click from search engine results.

Social Media and Local Search Engine Marketing

You can also improve your small business search engine marketing by advertising to local markets using social media websites.  Targeting hyperlocal clients can ensure that you are getting the most return for your advertising investment.  Maintaining a presence on social media sites can also be effective if your content is shared by clients—often, this sort of sharing can work very much like a word of mouth recommendation for an attorney.

Pay Per Click Local Search Engine Marketing

When you begin your local search engine marketing campaign, you may want to include pay per click advertising, which puts your firm's website into sponsored results for a web search.  However, in order to get the most bang for your advertising buck, you'll need to keep it hyperlocal.  Use the name of the town you're actually in, not the big city nearby.  If you're a law firm in a large city, consider using your neighborhood, rather than the city, as your advertising search terms.

When you're paying per click, it's also important to have targeted landing pages that speak to the concerns clients have when they search for a particular term.  You may want to have a large number of these landing pages in order to maximize your chances of conversions with your small business search engine marketing pay per click advertisements.

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