SEO Agency For Law Firms

Conquer Your Market with SEO

The internet is the most effective way to reach large numbers of people. For better or worse, the days of people searching for a lawyer by flipping through the Yellow Pages are well behind us. Because of this, the most important tool to reach clients is through the various search engines — Google in particular.

It does no good, though, to just put a web page out there and hope for the best. The old mantra of build it and they will come is a dangerous strategy. A web page is only as good as the people it reaches. THIS IS WHERE SEO COMES IN.

Search engine visibility is the No. 1 driver of potential clients to law firm websites AND it provides for the highest return on your marketing investment.

What is SEO?
What You Need to Know
SEO for Lawyers
Working with GLM
SEO Behind the Curtain
Does SEO Work?
Local SEO
Common Mistakes
SEO FAQs
Request Consultation

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

There are two basic ways to show up in the Search Results Page on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine showing up naturally or paying to be there. SEO helps you appear naturally (organically) either in the maps or the organic listings around the maps. Paying to be there is known as pay-per-click, and those results will be denoted with the word ‘Ad’ next to them. These ads are typically at the very top or very bottom of the page.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of practices that website owners use to increase their sites’ rankings in search results (primarily Google). It involves a deft mix of content development, technical know-how, and outside relationship-building. In a nutshell, SEO is a technical means of anticipating and satisfying the end user’s intentions. Google’s #1 goal is to serve its users with relevant, informative content based on its users’ search activity. The sophisticated technology they use to assess and rank websites is all geared toward that end. The better you serve the user—at least, in theory—the more favorable attention you’ll get from Google.

The search engines decide who to rank on the first page using a variety of algorithms that all work together. Our job as an SEO agency is to understand how these algorithms work and to optimize our clients’ websites accordingly. These algorithms are complex because they consider hundreds of different factors. However, each of those factors is typically easy to understand when evaluated individually.

What Works? What Doesn’t?

How Gladiator Law Marketing Stands Out

Here is the big secret to SEO… no one but Google truly knows how the search engines work. Google representatives are extremely cryptic; they speak in riddles; and their guidance often conflicts with previous guidance given. To make matters worse, their algorithm now makes changes autonomously through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We are not 100% convinced that even Google fully understands their own algorithm anymore.

There is no magical formula to SEO success. Having a plan and consistent execution of it goes a long way. Keeping track of industry changes helps as well, so that changes to the strategy are timely implemented. It is entirely possible to do everything right and still take longer than the firm wants in order to deliver consistent results. Sometimes Google makes changes to the results that make for a better user experience; sometimes those changes have unintended consequences and the new results are awful. Google will typically tweak the algorithm in these instances, but that tweak can sometimes take months.

Sounds crazy, right? So why would any firm want to pursue SEO? Because the No. 1 -way people find an attorney is online, and 69% of people don’t trust advertisements. If you want the best cases, your firm must do SEO.

Our agency’s approach to SEO is to do everything we think works. We don’t cut corners; we pay attention to everything; and if we can do it, we do it. When Google makes an update that sets the industry on fire, we work around the clock to put that fire out and figure out what we need to do to rebuild. SEO takes a lot of elbow grease, and we are willing to do the work.

SEO Articles of Interest

What Lawyers Need to Know About SEO Agencies

Google holds the keys. It is frustrating both for the law firm and the agency that Google holds so much power. But it is what it is. Google can and has changed the algorithm to the detriment of law firms. The agency has no control over this.

Not every law firm can be successful — it is a competition. Many firms want to spend a little and get a little. Marketing just doesn’t work that way. It is a competition. If you have a heavyweight title holder in your market, you need to be willing to get in the ring. You aren’t going to win by merely buying a ticket to the event. If you aren’t willing to do that, you are just wasting money that could be spent elsewhere.

It’s Not a Pay-For-Performance System When you hire an agency, you are hiring them to produce work. When you decide to stay with an agency, you are making that decision based on performance. Marketing is a risk that the firm must be willing to take. Some law firms wish agencies were paid on performance, much like contingency-based lawyers. But true performance is based on signed cases. Not only can a SEO agency not be paid contingency fees, but we are not in control of how effective your firm is at signing and closing cases.

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SEO for Lawyers: Sound Familiar?

You’ve hired a web developer. You’ve sat each of your partners with a photographer for professional headshots. You’ve enlisted everyone in the firm to write content for the new site. All told, you’ve invested tens of thousands in putting your best digital foot forward. You’ve built it; all that’s left is for ‘them’ to come. Right?

Wrong. The web is a crowded space. From national firms to local shops, the internet is awash in lawyers like you looking for their own piece of the proverbial pie. Sorry, but there’s no way anyone is going to find your site without a little help. Enter Google.

Prospective clients turn to the world’s favorite search engine to cut through the noise and serve up the nearest and dearest legal team. And those “lucky” few firms who show up at the top of the results end up winning 91.5% of the traffic. This is what makes SEO for lawyers critical. But as soon a firm throws their hat in the search engine marketing ring, they learn how stiff the competition really is.

Can Your Law Firm Relate?

Do you feel like you’re getting squeezed out of the market? Are the heavy hitters in your area throwing around enough cash to relegate your web site to page 3 of Google?

We know what you’re up against. We see it every day. But with more than 50 years of combined experience in marketing law firms, we’ve learned how to strategically position our clients to rise above the competition, increase traffic, and acquire new clients. The process is straightforward enough: develop an SEO campaign, write great content, and optimize your website to capitalize on Google’s proprietary search algorithm.

But what does all that mean, and how does it play out in execution? In the following, we’re going to give you the goods on SEO for lawyers. But, if you really want to know how to get your site on the first page of Google, then save yourself the read and give us a call.

The Process of Hiring GLM as Your Agency

Detailed Processes + Diligence = Top Results

We try to make a firm’s decision to hire us very similar to what it is like to work with us… easy. We are extremely organized and deliberate with all our recommendations.

Step One: The Initial Consultation

Everything starts with the first phone call with one of our strategists. The law firm will do most of the talking, as it is important to us to understand where the firm is and where the firm wants to be. We are trying to confirm that SEO is right for the law firm and then get the information we need to put together a strategy.

The topics we will be interested in hearing more about focus on your overall business objectives, trajectory and current/past marketing. Who are the ideal clients for your practice? What types of cases does the firm not want? What are the firm’s short- and long-term goals? We will want to hear about both offline and online marketing campaigns and what has, and hasn’t, worked for you. Together, we’ll talk about what Web marketing strategies might work best and put together a plan-of-attack.

Step Two: Strategy Formulation & Presentation

After the initial call, we begin to put together a strategy that is unique to the law firm. Our preference is to have a week to put this strategy together. We do not like to rush this process as we want to ensure that the proper due diligence is put into every campaign we may be starting.

The wrong strategy can be devastating and is not in either of our best interests.

While formulating our recommendations we:

Analyze the law firm’s current website and performance.
Conduct extensive competitive research. We can’t just match what competitors are doing — we must do more, to catch up.
Uncover why your current website is underperforming.
Apply our own industry knowledge to our findings and make recommendations for: Website Design, Content Development, Firm Reputation Management, Local Optimization, On-Site Optimization, Off-Site Promotion, Supplementary Efforts Like PPC, Strategy Management.

Once we have finalized our recommendations, we will have a second call for us to present our plan to the firm. Occasionally the firm has feedback for us, and we can make tweaks to the strategy based on the feedback. Our goal during this phase is to ensure a winning strategy is crafted and both parties fully understand the direction moving forward.

Step Three: On-Boarding

Yay! Once the firm has obviously made the right decision to utilize our SEO agency, we begin the on-boarding process. This begins with a phone call introducing the Project Manager (PM) your firm will be working with. They will go over the most immediate next steps and ask a few questions to better understand your communication preferences. Some of our clients like to meet monthly; others prefer less often. Some clients like to approve all content before it is posted; others never want to see it. This first phone call allows your Project Manager to ensure that they adjust our processes to serve you most effectively.

Additionally, the PM may supply the firm with questionnaires that we will use to set up the campaign and provide additional guidance to the firm. These may include design questionnaires, campaign targeting questionnaires, or photography tips/guides for the firm.

The project manager fills numerous roles including primary point-of-contact with the firm; quality control specialist working with the GLM production experts; and, management of ongoing deliverables and timelines.

Step Four: Implementation

The grunt work of setting up the campaign is over. We execute the plan that was agreed upon with the firm. This includes writing content, optimizing the website, building links, helping to manage the firm’s reputation, and generally falling into a routine with the firm. See the section below that discusses the components of an SEO campaign for more details.

Part of the implementation is reporting. Any agency should be reporting on:

The performance of the campaign
What work has been accomplished
What work is in progress
What work is coming up
Any challenges the campaign is facing.

Step Five: Evaluation & Adjustments

Nothing is static in marketing. If your market has established competitors, you can rest assured that they will notice your website’s changes and increasing presence. Those competitors will make corrections, and SEO turns into a chess match of sorts. Google is another stakeholder and, as previously mentioned, their algorithms never sit still.

A results-focused SEO agency will continually track and report on performance and share with you what is occurring in the SEO landscape. They will also share they plan to adapt your long-term SEO strategy to adjust to short-term fluctuations.

Because Google doesn’t provide step-by-step instructions when the algorithm shifts, it can take an SEO agency 2-3 months to research, test, monitor and coordinate with others in the industry to get clarity on whether tweaks are needed, or not.

Our evaluation process starts by asking these questions:

Content Performance: How is the existing content performing? Is Google ranking different types of content? Are there gaps in the content? Do we need more pages? Should our content be longer? Should our content be denser? Does the content need updated facts and figures? Can we make the content more user-friendly? Through programming? By reordering? With advanced design elements? What are competitors doing with their content?

Onsite Search Optimization: Has Google started to rank pages with specific types of optimization? Have competitors adjusted their optimization? Has something inadvertently changed? Is new content conflicting with the overall optimization of the site? Is the programming of the website still functioning well?

Offsite Promotion: Have competitors increased their link-building? (Quantity vs. Quality) Is Google looking for specific links? Have competitors gotten the same links we have, thus reducing their value? Are some older links now harming the site? Have we lost links? Is the anchor text over- or under-optimized?

Reputation: Are competitors getting more links? Is the firm getting enough links? Has the firm received some bad press recently? Have competitors had exceptional press recently? Are there opportunities we haven’t fully taken advantage of?

SEO: Behind the Curtain

Primary Components of an SEO Campaign

The technical and analytic aspects of attorney SEO may seem daunting to the uninitiated, but there is enough information on the web for virtually anyone to run their own SEO campaign. Here are the 7 components of a standard SEO campaign.

Caveat: Effective SEO takes time, patience, and expertise. It also requires a healthy network of external relationships for link-building. These constraints make it nearly impossible for most law firms to handle their own SEO effectively.

SEO Agency Strategies

Component #1: Your SEO Strategy

The importance of having a defined and well-thought-out strategy cannot be overstated. If you don’t know where you are starting from, it is tough to know where you are, and impossible to know how to get to where you want to be. A comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) strategy will outline action items for each of the below components.

The strategy should be well-documented and include priorities, timelines, and resource allocations.

A tool is only as good as the person using it. At Gladiator Law Marketing, we have some of the best (both people and tools). We take a fully integrative and comprehensive approach to make sure your law firm SEO elevates your visibility and drives results. We personalize your website design, tailor content to your firm and your specific needs, and perform exhaustive research on your market, utilizing the latest technology to keep you at the front of the pack.

Component #2: Website Design & User Experience

Website design is critical. Having a poorly designed website is like putting gas into a car with a hole in the tank. Website design continues to have an increasingly influential effect on a law firm’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. The most recent adjustments made by Google in their Medic Update placed significant focus on the usability of your website’s design. Specifically, how well potential clients engage with your website directly impacts your search rankings.

Lawyers are often surprised to learn that Google has been tracking the behavior of their visitors for many years. Google knows how potential clients find your site, how long search visitors stay on your website, how many pages your visitors are viewing and how many inquiries/engagements search users complete on your website.

Google places a priority on delivering quality search results, and that includes promoting websites that provide visitors with a positive experience — in other words, are easy to navigate and readily provide the information sought.

If you haven’t updated the design of your law firm website in several years, it is time to consider how effective website design not only makes you seem more competitive but actually makes you more competitive.

Component #3: Content Development

Great websites craft their content in a way that not only addresses searchers’ interests (keyword phrasing) but their intent to act upon that information (keyword intent). Google “knows” whether your material provides the answers searchers are looking for. When picking keywords, don’t limit yourself to the “obvious” keyword phrases like “San Antonio personal injury lawyer.” Take it a step forward by thinking strategically about what potential clients will be searching for and anticipating their needs.

As the chart on the right reflects, 5+ word phrases make up 41.7% of searches. What this indicates is that potential clients probably won’t be searching for a “Personal Injury Lawyer” or “Criminal Defense Lawyer.” Instead, they’ll be searching for “a lawyer to help me sue my idiot neighbor for burning down my garage.” Especially as voice search grows in popularity, these are the sorts of searches lawyers will need to anticipate.

Content development has been one of the most influential areas of change over the last couple of years. Short, keyword-laden posts used to be ideal, but Google now favors long, comprehensive articles that are chock full of useful information. Google has significantly expanded their analysis and understanding of your website content – in particular, in comparison with your competitor’s content. Google inherently wants to reward/rank the best content in response to the user search query. Google evaluates your website’s content from both quantitative and qualitative aspect.

Gladiator Law Marketing has invested substantial research funds to identify those search queries and content topics that will generate cases for our clients. While other SEO agencies stop their footwork at Google’s keyword tool, we dig deeper, monitoring and tracking hundreds of thousands of topics. The Gladiator content strategy will take into consideration primary and secondary topics; optimum length, including competitive research; content hierarchy; source material / article citation; et al.

Your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy with Gladiator Law Marketing includes a detailed content development plan that strategically identifies and targets your most valuable audience. Our SEO agency has made significant investments in research data that identifies the most valuable keywords for your practice with the highest return-on-investment (ROI). WE ENSURE THAT YOUR WEB MARKETING DOLLARS ARE APPLIED TO THOSE SEO STRATEGIES MOST LIKELY TO GENERATE NEW BUSINESS FOR YOUR LAW FIRM.

Component #4: Technical On-Site Optimization

Technical SEO has to do with the back-end programming of the website, server settings, and general structure of the website. There are dozens of these onsite SEO signals that tell the search engines about your practice and website. Consequently, all these individual onsite SEO components have a cumulative effect on your search rankings.

Because onsite optimization is more technical, it is often the least user-friendly aspect of SEO. This is one of the areas where other SEO agencies will cut corners.

Onsite SEO can be detailed, technical and require significant elbow-grease. Most lawyers won’t understand or see the backend optimization, so SEO agencies often take advantage, leaving these crucial rankings factors sub-par. Some onsite SEO signal factors include: title/meta tags; SSL security; structured data (schema) markup; image alt tags; site hierarchy / URL structure; robots.txt file; XML sitemaps; media file names; render-blocking scripts; load speed concerns; and other onsite considerations. When you work with Gladiator Law Marketing, we’ve got you covered. Our team makes it a point to outwork your competition – including when it comes to onsite SEO.

Component #5 Link-Building & Directories

Google uses links to judge the quality of your content. Inbound come in to your domain from other sites. Internal links connect to content within your domain. Outbound links point to sites outside your domain. If authoritative external sites like NOLO link to you, Google will perceive your site as truly valuable. If you link out to other quality sites and visitors click through, it’ll also judge your site as a useful resource. Link-building is crucial to establishing your page’s authority in the eyes of Google.

When working with Gladiator Law Marketing our SEO strategy includes a link development initiative. This includes article publication on your behalf, networking with other website owners, and a promotion strategy for your content that helps generate traffic and, consequently, serves to build links. Link development is a time consuming, expensive, and effective component of your search marketing plan.

Most importantly, building links from authoritative sites in the legal domain will help your page ascend in Google’s rankings. The keyword here is authoritative. Links from low-value sites and/or link farms will hurt—not help—your ranking.

Business Listings / Directories

These are third-party websites that list your business, such as Google My Business, Yelp, Bing, AVVO, or Facebook. What is most important is that your Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP listing) are consistent across all of them. At one time, a common strategy was to build as many of these listings as possible. Now you would be better focused on ensuring that the most common listings are as complete as possible with photos, a great description, operating hours, and FAQs with answers.

HERE ARE SOME OF THE MOST AUTHORITATIVE DIRECTORIES FOR LAWYERS TO WORK WITH: FindLaw websites, Nolo, Lawyers.com, Justia, Best Lawyers, Law Guru, Law Info, Lawyers US Legal, Superlawyers, Avvo.

Component #6: Reputation

HUGE! HUGE! This can be one of the more frustrating components for SEO agencies, because we have very little control over this aspect of your search marketing. Yet it is one of the most important components and is becoming more important every day.

Google is continuing to refine their ability to craft an online persona for your practice, based on continued improvements in data mining and cross-coordination across their platforms. For example, Google’s Local Service Ads (LSA) platform will likely include background check and bar licensing information once launched nationally for lawyers. As we’ve seen from other Google products (think Google My Business) this information will not be segmented only to the LSAs but may include display in the maps or organic rankings down the road.

Actively working on your E-A-T credibility and acquiring client reviews are the most important reputation builders.

Client Reviews

Your firm needs to get reviews on the top sites on a consistent basis. The way you do that is to ask every client to give you a review, preferably when they are happy with you, and then follow up. Most people will agree to do it but then forget, so follow-up is important. Here are a few tips:

Ask consistently.
Aim to get 10% of clients to leave a review.
Ask everyone you are involved with to leave a review. If the client has parents or a spouse, ask them, too.
Follow up with a text message and/or email.
Spread out the reviews on Google, Facebook, and AVVO.

Component #7: Reporting & Analytics

Track, Adjust, Repeat. If it wasn’t measured, then it didn’t happen. The only way to know if what you’re doing is working is to measure everything meticulously and track all changes carefully. Using Google Analytics, check your organic traffic over time. Additionally, use the Google Search Console to see which of your keywords are generating the most traffic.

Reporting on SEO performance is not as clear-cut as anyone would like. Search rankings are personalized, which means that what one person sees in Google could be different from what someone else in the same room sees. Geographic proximity to the firm dramatically impacts results. There is no single metric or tool that can be used to understand the performance of the SEO campaign.

Grading your SEO performance requires integrating a series of tools that collectively reflect the landscape of search visibility.

Make adjustments, monitor trends, and adjust your content accordingly. Keep in mind, SEO work is not instantaneous. It can often take time for on-site changes to register on Google. Work incrementally, giving yourself – and your SEO agency – plenty of time and space to observe whether your strategy is working as it should. Never stop aiming for improvement. Gladiator Law Marketing has regularly scheduled performance meetings with each of our clients where we review what the data shows us and coordinate with the clients’ intake data and on-the-ground observations. We partner closing with our clients to build a comprehensive understanding of total search performance.

The Only Question That Really Matters: Does SEO Work?

The purpose of all this complicated research, content production, and fine-tuning is simple: to draw in more traffic so that you can win more clients to your firm. SEO has reliably proven its worth over and over. As effective as it is, however, SEO is no overnight solution. You can’t walk into the office the morning after a new website launch and expect to find a slew of new clients waiting for you in the lobby.

SEO takes time, and the measure of its effectiveness can’t be reduced to any single metric. We’ve been at this for a long time, and we’ve learned exactly what to look for to ensure an SEO campaign is moving forward as it should. Here are 6 of the most important metrics:

Keyword Rankings – At one time, ranking was everything. Now, there are too many factors to rely solely on rankings. For one thing, every person sees a different set of results. On top of that, the proliferation of long-tail searches (see above) makes it difficult to monitor all the relevant keywords effectively. Nevertheless, ranking is a helpful point of reference to keep in sight.
Organic Users – The number of people who visit your website from search engine results. In general, this number should increase year over year. If you’ve recently launched a new campaign, however, you should see more immediate growth (month over month).
New Users – The number of users who visit your website for the first time. The ratio between new and organic users is important. If you find that your only users are first-timers, then that could indicate that your site isn’t valuable enough to keep visitors coming back. With that said, law firms will have more new users than repeat users because of the nature of the business.
Bounce Rate – As mentioned above, bounce rate helps you understand how users interact with your website. If a visitor arrives and then leaves without clicking on anything else, this qualifies as a bounce. Most attorney websites will have bounce rates between 40 and 65 percent. Lower is better.
Number of Inquiries – This is an important metric to determine whether your SEO campaign is attracting interested leads. That said, not every inquiry will lead to a signed case. Conversion rates depend on an array of offline variables: market dynamics, business development skills, and so on. Still, this is an important metric to ensure your SEO work is doing what it needs to do. Especially in the first six months of a new campaign, this number should rise steadily.
Signed Cases – The most important metric to track is the number of signed cases. For every new case, a firm needs to track the client’s answer to that all-important question: “Where did you hear about us?” Unfortunately, it takes time for new SEO campaigns to produce this result consistently. Each of the preceding metrics will need to be tracked in the meantime.

Is Local SEO Different?

Visitors with Closer Proximity Convert @ Higher Rates

The phrase ‘local SEO’ can mean two different things: (i) Ranking Organically in Your Local Geography, and/or (ii) Ranking in Google Maps. The two are closely related but also inherently different.

The first is ranking in the main organic section within the confines of your target location, which is most commonly the city where your office is located. This is accomplished by optimizing the page on your website for local phrases and building links from other local businesses. Additionally, the work performed to rank organically will also help your law firm rank in the maps, and vice-versa.

Ranking in Google Maps is an important component to lawyer seo. Some of the ranking factors the law firm will have control over, while some of them the law firm will not be able to control.

Proximity To The Searcher – Law firms that are closer to the person conducting the search will be given a boost. The law firm has no control over this signal.
Reviews – This aspect of the ranking algorithm is something the firm can contribute to the campaign. Getting reviews from people in the local area, that rate your firm highly, and mention the phrases that you want to rank for will help your maps rankings.
Consistency of Citations – This refers to the law firm’s Name, Address, and Phone Number. (NAP) The law firm’s information should be consistent across the web, on the Google My Business listing, and on the firm’s website.
Google My Business Category – Perhaps one of the most overlooked components is making sure the categories are selected appropriately for your practice area. Many law firms will choose the ‘law firm’ category when a more specific option is available, such as Divorce Attorney. Google will allow you to have multiple categories and it is important to put them into the system in priority order.

Gladiator Law Marketing can help your law firm improve your Local SEO visibility. Talk to us today – no obligation – to learn how your practice can sign more cases from local search. Call 1-888-683-3212 or contact us online for more information.

Common Mistakes in SEO

There are many ways in which an SEO campaign can go off the rails. Here are 7 of the most common mistakes we’ve seen committed by lawyers:

Keyword Abuse – Keywords are crucial to SEO, but you have to know how to use them. Pick the wrong keywords and you won’t reach your ideal target. Overstuff your content with keywords, and it will read like something written by a machine. Worse, Google will penalize you severely.
Immobility – Mobile-readiness is incredibly important to Google. Fail to develop a responsive site, and you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the list.
Plagiarism/Content Duplication – In the early days of SEO, unscrupulous consultants made their bones mass-producing keyword-rich boilerplate content. Google now recognizes duplicate content and demotes it swiftly.
Missing Technical Details – Especially for do-it-yourself firms, these technical oversights add up to considerable losses in rank preference.

Link Malpractice – Without inbound links, Google will judge your site irrelevant. Without outbound links, it’ll judge it incompetent. Without internal links and a sitemap, it won’t have the means to piece everything together.
Ignoring Local Data – 46% of all searches on Google are local, yet 56% of businesses have yet to claim their local listing. Law firms are no exception. If you’d like to be found by locals, you need to claim and complete your listings.
Analytic Neglect – The key to any marketing campaign is close analysis and incremental adjustment. Without a close eye on the data, there’s no way for lawyers to know whether what they’re doing is working.

Thankfully, each of these mistakes is entirely avoidable with a little technical know-how and a lot of attention to detail. These are the types of oversights we help our clients to avoid so that they can maximize their performance in search rankings.

Questions & Answers

How much time is going to be required of the firm?

That depends on the preferences of the firm. If the firm does not want to be involved, they don’t have to be. But the firm needs to be willing to let us do our job. We prefer to at least have scheduled reporting calls where we can get feedback from the firm. There are some things that we just can’t tell from the analytics. I can tell you that firms that have an active interest in the campaign tend to perform better.

How long does SEO take to work?

I have seen campaigns take as little as three months or as much as several years. It largely depends on what the firm is starting with and how competitive the market is. If you can’t afford to wait, PPC may be a better option.

How much does SEO cost?

There are fewer firms competing, but the amount each firm is spending is increasing. This is problematic for firms that are entering the market. SEO is not cheap, and the last thing you want to do is bring a normal hammer when you should have brought a powered jackhammer. Our services typically start at $2,000 / month; our average client spends close to $5,000 / month; and large personal injury clients in major metro areas have SEO budgets of $20,000+ monthly. ( This does not include PPC ad spend. )

How is a SEO budget determined?

We look at the competitors in the market and determine how much content needs to be created, how much link-building will be required to catch up and beat your competitors, and how much maintenance to the strategy/site will be needed. Understanding the competition is a crucial step in knowing what will be required to be competitive. Remember, search engine optimization (SEO) is a competition – there are winners and losers.

Do we require a long-term contract?

We ask our clients for annual agreements, because SEO takes time and we don’t want to start campaigns that we won’t have time to produce results for. SEO is also extremely labor intensive, and these agreements ensure we will not only have the dedicated resources in place to serve your firm, but to meet the needs of all our clients. Annual agreements help the entire collective.

Does the law firm own the work GLM produces?

Yes. The only parts of our SEO work that the firm will not directly own are third-party software tools we utilize for all our clients. For example, this would include our professional subscriptions to services like AHREFs, that is part of our SEO suite.

All website design, content creation, link building, profile development, et al., are always the property of the law firm.

Will the firm need a new website?

We will not take on a client who has an existing website that we believe will not work. However, if the website is built on WordPress and is on par with other local competitors’ sites, we can use what you have. Sometimes we can make a ‘facelift’ to the website to get it more competitive and last just a little bit longer. We will always advise, in detail, what is in your best interest and the reasons behind any recommendations we offer.

SEO For Lawyers – The Gladiator Way

Be Strategic. Invest. Outperform.

Tools are only as useful as the people who wield them. With over 50 years of experience, our team of experts use the best and latest in marketing technology to help our clients succeed online. Our fully integrative approach is both personal and professional. Personally, we get to know you, your firm, and your market through exhaustive research. Professionally, we integrate your unique goals with our extensive repertoire of SEO methods and practices.

The reason our retention rate is 95% is that we legitimately care about our clients and the campaigns we run. When Google makes a huge update to the algorithm, we work tirelessly to evaluate what changes we need to make and have a sense of urgency to get those changes live. SEO isn’t easy, but we try to make working with us as easy as possible.

Are you ready to stop getting buried by your competitors on Google? Do you want to see what happens when a team of experts brings all their strategic and creative resources to bear on your success? Then pick up the phone and give us a call today.

REQUEST A SEO CONSULTATION

At 95%, our year-over-year retention rate is 15 percentage points higher than the industry average.We can help your firm get the SEO results it has been missing.