SEO Tip #5: See yourself through search engine glasses
If you’re thinking about getting serious about SEO you’ll want to start off by analyzing your existing traffic to see your strengths and weakness. Most likely your goal will be to increase traffic to your site but that alone is not going to determine the success of your campaign. You’ll need to look at the big picture.
For example, what search terms are people using to get to your site? If the first 20+ search terms used to find your site are all variations of your firm name, that will show that people who find your site are trying to find you. It’s nice your clients, family, friends and high school crushes were successful in finding you but new clients will not be searching for your firm name or your name. You need to attract your potential clients by optimizing for your keywords and having enticing descriptions.
Let me back up a bit. You should come up with a list of target keywords (5-7 or so) and compare your target to the actual phrases being used to find you. You will likely be surprised at some of the phrases being used. At my old firm, one of the lawyers shared a name with a former president (spelled differently). His name was always one of our top search phrases which wasn’t one of our targeted phrases and didn’t do us a whole lot of good (but made me laugh nonetheless when I envisioned fifth graders somewhere out there accidently doing their presidential report on one of our lawyers and not the actual president).
A tool that I have found to be helpful is Stomper Site Seer. You can run a free report on your site and get all sorts of information. In keeping with the target keywords theme of this posting, the StomperNet report will show you what Google thinks your site is about, which often varies quite a bit from what you may think your firm is about. Don’t take for granted that everyone knows you’re a law firm. I often find the word “lawyer” or “attorney” missing from web sites. It sounds surprising but it’s either overlooked, assumed or in a graphic, without an alt tag, so from the search engine perspective, they have no idea you’re a law firm even though the beautiful graphic in your header may say “XYZ Law Firm” prominently on every page. Once you know how search engines are reading your site, your course of action becomes clearer.
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