Here’s what TERRIBLE law firm SEO looks like.
Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) for law firms and CPA firms is hard work.
It’s complex, difficult, and extremely labor intensive, which means it can be pretty expensive. And that leads some organizations to seek a low-cost alternative. And, as in most things, you get what you pay for. It’s also an area where a lot of supposed-experts are selling snake oil, promising results while actually doing more harm than good.
Google’s wised up in recent years, changing its algorithm to reward useful, valuable content, while penalizing companies for trying the old keyword-packing tricks that used to work. (Some firms typed countless buzzwords in white text invisibly against a white background? Don’t do it.) Google values links from credible sites back to your website, reasonably inferring that if those credible sites link to X site, then X site must be valuable. This makes sense.
However, some “Black Hat” SEO practitioners seek quantity over quality. These guys simply dump useless gibberish into blog posts of credible websites, with links back to their clients’ sites hidden inside them. We find a lot of these in the Comments sections of our blog posts. Perhaps we should be flattered, that some people apparently find our website, blog, or traffic valuable enough to leverage to their own ends.
For example, here’s something that showed up in the Comments section of one of our blog posts awhile ago. This is clearly a lame attempt at “link-building,” i.e. commenting in another’s blog with a link back to your site. I don’t know this “Frank Byers” Decatur lawyer, who was doing his SEO, or whether this “william max” commenter is even a real person (doubtful), but this type of junk search-engine optimization is neither effective nor justifiable. And I’m not going to link to his site in this post either.
At Fishman Marketing, we occasionally provide SEO services to our law firm and accounting firm clients.
But heck, never like this.
Be careful whom you trust with your SEO-related activities. It’s your reputation, after all.
