If You Build It, They Will Come… If They Can Find You

Remember Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner builds a baseball stadium on his Iowa farm to let the ghosts of old baseball players play?  That voice in his head (which I’m sure has plenty of non-supernatural explanations that can be found in the DSM) keeps telling him that if he builds this ballpark, people will come.  And, because this is a Hollywood movie, they do.

It worked out okay for Costner, but that kind of thinking can be a real problem for a lawyer developing a website.  One of the most frustrating things for a lawyer just starting out marketing her law practice on the web is when after countless hours writing perfect copy and getting the look and feel of the website just right, she launches her site and… nobody shows up.

There is more effectively marketing your firm on the web than a pretty web design and decent content.  People looking for your services need to be able to find your site.  Imagine that you are a divorce lawyer in Raleigh.  You represent clients who need a divorce lawyer in Raleigh.  You have a beautiful website to help you attract the clients you want.  The potential clients who need your services increasingly turn to web research to find what they need, which 70% of the time means typing in Google:  “divorce lawyer Raleigh.”

Now further imagine that when these potential clients Google search on “divorce lawyer Raleigh”, your beautiful website telling the world about how great you are just doesn’t show up.  And for the most part, if you don’t show up on the first page of Google search results, you may as well not show up at all.  There goes several thousand dollars and hours of your life down the drain.

So, how do you stop this from happening?  How do you make sure that the folks who Google search for your practice area actually find you?  By understanding and using SEO – search engine optimization.  SEO is, as it sounds, just the act of building and designing your website so that it is optimized to be found by search engines, particularly Google.  SEO is like networking for your website — potential clients ask their friend Google who if Google knows any divorce lawyer in Raleigh and Google spits out its results.

For a lot of us, myself included, SEO dips a little deeper in the techno-geek well than we feel comfortable drawing.  If you are not an inveterate nerd and very comfortable with the concepts of internet marketing, you will probably need someone to help you with SEO for your law firm website.  I mean, you don’t want your clients thinking they can do their own divorces, do you?

There are a lot of folks out there who can help you with SEO, possibly including your web designer.  There are also companies that specialize in working on law firm SEO, like Stem Legal.  If, however, you do feel comfortable trying your hand at SEO on your own, here is a start.  There is a new SEO tool available to you:  Google has recently altered their keyword research tool, showing actual search volumes on various terms.  If you are interested in SEO, this is a pretty big deal.

(On the other hand, if all that sounded like: “blah blah blah SEO blah blah blah Google blah blah blah” to you, just find someone to do SEO for you.)

I know the last thing you want to do is pour more money into the expensive website you just developed, but a website without SEO is like having the keys to a brand new car — a car you would love to drive, if anyone would tell you where it is.

Maybe it’s in heaven.  Or just Iowa.