Google and Bing’s ever increasing emphasis on presenting local search results can be to your benefit if you take advantage of it. For instance, taking local search results out of the equation, it would be nearly impossible for your law firm to rank on the first page of Google for “injury lawyer.” If I do an all-in-title search in Google for that keyword, I get X results. That is a massive amount of competition, and it would take a massive effort (and most likely a large budget) to get to the first ten results.
However, thanks to the magic of IP addresses, Google and Bing can both detect where you are (with a fair amount of accuracy) and display results that are specific to your geography, even if your search query does not specify a location. So if I am in Dickson, Tennessee (which I am), and I search for “injury lawyer,” after a couple of results from very large nationwide law firms, I am displayed three Nashville-area firms. For you, that’s the sweet spot. You want to be in those local results.
This is a new area of search engine marketing. Part of making this happen is just good ol’ SEO – on-page optimization and link building. In addition to SEO, there is the process of setting up your law firm in the particular search engine’s local database and pushing it to the top for your area.
In Google, you do this by setting up a Places account. Visit www.google.com/places to set up your account and add your physical location to Google. The next step is to get reviews for your firm. Contact people you know or clients who will speak favorably of you, have them visit your Places page and add a review. The more of these you get, the better.
If you do this location stuff as described above while also engaging in an aggressive, keyword-focused search engine optimization/marketing campaign, you will have a very good chance of appearing in very broad searches performed in your marketing area.
I do not want to imply that you should not also optimize your site for geographically-qualified search terms. You definitely should. All the old rules still apply. However, if you do both – SEO plus local search optimization, you stand to capture a larger portion of the search engine traffic in your target market for the practice areas you specialize in.
Contact us today to find out how we can help you dominate your market with local search placement!
By Brad Hart