Lawyer Marketing GuyLets Understand the Marketing…!

Search engines are huge. They’re important. They’re useful.

Let’s start with what I’m talking about when I say search engines. Search engines are web applications that crawl the web indexing text. Search engines allow users to search the index by keyword, and provide links to matching resources.

Directories are also lists of internet resources, but they are manually entered by a person (rather than the automatically crawled by search engine spiders). Directories also allow users to search an index by keyword.

Because people use directories in the same way as search engines, they are often lumped together as search engines. There is also confusion because Yahoo started out as a directory, but added crawl-based search in 2002.

The business of search engines is fascinating.

The race in the search engine world is going faster and faster, with the giants adding new tools and services left and right.

Google just launched a new cost-per-impression and targeting for Ad Words beta, and a personal search tool in beta – allowing users to keep a detailed history of their past searches. Yahoo launched My Web in beta on Wednesday (4/27), boosting their personal search history service. Google’s IPO was the hottest news in technology since the 1990’s.

And the usefulness of search engines is mesmerizing.

According to the January, 2005 Search Engine Users study by Pew Internet, 38 million American adults use a search engine every day.

We use search engines to find definitions too modern to be in the dictionary.

We use search engines to find an exact address.

We use search engines to research geography, history, and astrology.

We use search engines to see photos of landscape designers’ prior work.

We use search engines to learn all about Britney Spears.

We use search engines to find a lawyer when we have no referral.

People often like to do a little reading about an attorney to establish an image of who the attorney is. We want to see what kind of a relationship we can have with the lawyer before calling with him or her.

This is a good reason to have a website. And a good reason to market with search engines, so people can find your site.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has many parts – advertising (sponsored links and pay-per-click ads), directory submission (paid or unpaid), and search engine optimization (SEO – where your site’s copy, design, code, and structure make it easier to get higher results in search engine queries).

Each of these factors of SEM is valuable, but you need to evaluate your business goals to see which are right for you.

Paid advertising is often a good way to jump-start your search engine rankings.

There are a lot of attorneys on the web, and attorney directories have been marketing on the web for a long time, so they hold the highest organic rankings. Findlaw is everywhere.

It takes time to get organic rankings on search engines, and in directories.

While directory administrators are reviewing your submission, and before the web crawlers have found and indexed your site, you might use sponsored links and pay-per-click ads to get your site to be listed on the first two pages.

And since most users don’t look at results past the second page on a search engine (iProspect’s Search Engine User Attitudes Survey), you really want to be on the first two pages.

If you provide valuable information (and my first recommendation is that you do – include links to resources, for example) you might even get a link or two from an outside site. And those links boost your organic rankings on many search engines.

Submitting to directories can not only allow your site to appear in directory results, but some search engines also use directory listings to determine the rank of their crawled results. Some directories allow you to submit your site to them for a fee, some simply require that you do your research and submit to the proper category.

Within your site, there is a lot you can do to boost your organic ranking. You can optimize your site’s copy to utilize competitive keywords for your practice, so crawlers associate those keywords in their index with your site.

You can optimize your sites design, code, and structure, to enable those spiders to crawl through your site quickly and efficiently. Building search engine optimization into your site is becoming standard, but it’s best to make sure your web designer is on top of it.

Using search engine marketing, you can help get your site on search engines so people who need you can find you.