Internet Content Specialist For Attorneys: Avoid Pitfalls
Monday, May 16, 2011 12:39
Geoff Caplan
An Internet content specialist specializing in online marketing and promotion for attorneys has noted that the most successful legal professionals who market online have a keen insight into legal issues that affects the every day lives of individuals and businesses.
“It’s a challenging time for marketing of all types,” observes Boca Raton Florida based legal online marketing specialist Geoff Caplan. “Those attorneys who carefully target their message, however, and skillfully communicate their most proficient areas of their practice, are doing quite well.”
Caplan points out that “organic” or “natural” search engine content for attorneys has been very cost effective, as opposed to pay per click advertising, because search engines “like” relevant content that contributes to the user experience.
“Content devised simply to spoof a search engine will not have lasting duration,” he observes, “Google especially is always enhancing its search algorithms to discover unique, relevant content that helps them to build a quality index of sites.”
Attorneys have an especially fertile landscape to plow right now due to the many legal specialists who exist and the hypercompetitive, crowded market for legal services in most of the major metropolitan areas of the United States. Strategies like useful blog content, interesting, issue-driven press releases and well-produced videos on various legal topics have proven to be extremely valuable to attorneys in these crowded markets.
Natural Search
Unlike Pay Per Click advertising, which can yield fast click throughs and results, Geoff Caplan says that SEO Content and SEO Copywriting is more sustainable, at a lower cost.
“Quality and sustainability of web content should be an important strategic goal for any attorney or service professional, for that matter,” he observes.
The premise behind natural search as an Internet marketing strategy for attorneys is that savvy website visitors know the difference between paid listings and natural listings. The credibility is there because, like traditional public relations via journalism, readers tend to place more credence in content that is displayed based upon relevance and topic appeal.
He points out that, according to blog.strategynoder.com, it is also likely that natural search will become more important in the coming months. Yahoo’s new Site Match program, which mixes some paid results with natural results, is certain to get some close scrutiny from the FTC (even though the fees paid are not supposed to influence rankings). This type of public attention will no doubt educate some oblivious users as to what “sponsored results” actually are. More importantly, other search engines are likely to use this as a means of differentiation from Yahoo. It is no coincidence that Ask Jeeves announced that it was getting rid of its similar program the day after Yahoo’s new program was unveiled, claiming that it was impossible to produce unbiased results using this methodology. Microsoft also recently claimed that they were taking steps to further differentiate paid results from natural results. No matter what the end result, one probable outcome of this new attention to paid search engine advertising is that more average searchers will learn the differences between paid and natural search results, and many will instinctively favor the latter.
Geoff Caplan can be reached at 561-620-4856, email Geoff@geoffcaplan.com
