Speaker 1: Welcome to the SEO.co Search Engine Optimization Podcast. Digital marketing essentials and next level tactics. From offsite and onsite optimization to persuasive selling and everything in between. You'll learn actionable tips on what it takes to outright and outrank your competition.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to the SEO.co podcast. Today we're going to continue the talk about how law firms can benefit from SEO. For firms that have the money to use PPC advertising as part of their outbound marketing strategy, that's fine. But most law firms and attorneys are better off using organic inbound marketing methods to reach potential clients in a cost effective and sustainable manner. And SEO is the answer. Doing SEO halfway won't get you very far though. For Google searches, 75% of all clicks go to results on the first page, including 57% to the first three results. You need a targeted SEO strategy to help you rise to the top. In doing so, you'll benefit from increased visibility, website traffic, and leads. You're in the business of practicing law, not optimizing websites so that they satisfy Google's ever-changing algorithmic requirements. We get that. But regardless of how you choose to handle the SEO aspect of your law firm marketing, it's helpful to have a very basic understanding of what goes into the SEO process. Here are the fundamental factors that influence SEO and search rankings. Technical aspects. Google and other search engines, for that matter, have some technical requirements and expectations for websites. These include factors like website structure, meta-titles, meta-descriptions, URLs, headers, image alt text, etc. Navigation. Google is in the business of satisfying its users. It does this by sending them to websites that offer high-level user experiences. Thus, Google rewards websites that optimize their navigation to make it fast, seamless, and intuitive. Content. Content is the gasoline to a website's engine. Content gives the search engine something to search and provides your human visitors with information to sink their teeth into. Backlinks. Search engines find and process information by crawling websites and reading them quickly. Backlinks allow them to search websites faster and create a web of authority that tells them which pages are relevant, valuable, and authoritative. The more backlinks you have pointing to your website, preferably from other high-authority websites, the more Google values your site. Each of these fundamentals is important. Eliminating any one of them is like removing a wheel from a car. It's not going to travel very far without it. But the first two are fairly easy to address and leave alone. You'll need to monitor and optimize over time, but they don't require constant hand-holding. The latter two elements, on the other hand, are a bit more involved. Content and backlinks go together. And if you want to skyrocket your search traffic, you need a powerful link building strategy. Search engines use links to discover new web pages and determine how well a page should rank in their results. Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites. The more links your law firm website is able to acquire from authoritative websites and blogs, the more you'll benefit. The primary objective of link building for law firms are to increase discoverability. Think of your website like a city, and the links that lead to it are like roads. The more links you have, the more opportunities internet users have to find your website. In this sense, link building is all about increasing discoverability and driving traffic. Link building also increases authority. Google is in the business of keeping its users happy. It does this by supplying people with the most relevant and useful results for their searches. Thus, Google wants to deliver authoritative pages and stay away from amateurish results that don't yield value. One of the primary ways in which Google determines a page's authority is by how many other respected websites link back to it. Link building is an investment in your website's reputation. Link building also increases conversions. The right link building strategy targets very specific keywords that resonate with a very particular audience. As opposed to generic outbound strategies that cast a wide net, link building focuses on quality over quantity. This leads to higher conversion rates. And lastly, link building increases sustainability. The moment a law firm stops paying for PPC advertisements, all of their traffic disappears. With SEO, this isn't true. Link building is an organic method that builds upon itself and actually continues to grow over time, even if you stop investing in it. This makes it the single most sustainable strategy in modern digital marketing. Now that you know why link building is important and how it impacts your ability to generate clients for your law firm, let's take a look at some essential building blocks of an effective link building strategy. Quality content. The content is the glue to link building. Without good quality content, you have nothing to link to. So before you can dig too deeply into technical and strategic elements of building out links, make sure you have a solid foundation of content, also known as linkable assets. Thorough keyword research. While the days of keyword stuffing are behind us, there's still some immense value in performing keyword research and developing content around the ideas and search terms that your prospective clients care about. Networking. Believe it or not, a big part of link building is networking. The more connections you have, the easier it is to secure link placement on high authority websites that generate a lot of link juice. It's easy to get overwhelmed with all of the demands of link building, but when you break it down into the basics, it becomes much more manageable. Tune in next time as we explore this topic a bit further as there's just too much content for one episode. Thanks again for joining us today on the SEO.co podcast.

Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on the SEO.co podcast. We appreciate your time. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit SEO.co for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more podcast episodes to help you improve your site's long-term SEO success.