This first post will reach an audience of one: me. But for posterity, let me share a little about my background.
I fell into SEO in the early 2000s while moonlighting for a small family business as I finished by law degree. We were looking for ways to wean the business off of paid leads. My job was to learn how to generate our own leads using our own website. This was before the blogging boom, so my resources were limited to online articles what I could find at the bookstore. After doing a bit of research, I built a hideous website with Microsoft Frontpage. I then read Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (at the time, the only book at Barnes & Noble on the topic) and applied what I learned. Within several months, we outranked all of our lead generation sources and were completely self-sustaining. (If only it were still so easy!)
This first brush with SEO taught me that success in internet marketing was achievable and that small businesses can leverage SEO to compete with much larger competitors. When I decided to start my own law firm several years later, I built the firm around what is now called inbound marketing (the buzzword hadn’t been coined yet). My little one-man-firm website did pretty well. I quickly outranked my local competitors, including those who had outsourced their law firm SEO to some of the big players in the industry. After several months of concentrated SEO, my site had outgrown my geographic area, outranking many national websites for competitive keywords.
Of course, high rankings are only half of the equation. To succeed, I needed to convert my visitors into paying clients. After a bit of trial and error, I finally decided to spend time learning the basic principles of conversion rate optimization (CRO). This science-based approach gave me a framework to further refine my internet marketing strategy. It also taught me the most important lesson about using a firm website for lead generation: the success of a law firm website cannot be measured by aesthetics or even by traffic, but only by how successful the site is in leading visitors to take specific actions.
Although my site did well, I was spending more time on internet marketing than I was practicing law. Recognizing that I couldn’t be both a full-time SEO and a full-time lawyer, I looked for ways to outsource my internet marketing. My first attempts at outsourcing taught me two things:
- The vast majority of so-called SEO consultants prey on attorneys’ ignorance. The current SEO marketplace is overcrowded with clueless shysters who overcharge for outdated SEO tactics. Offers abound for social bookmarking, forum spam, junk links from unrelated websites. Very few SEOs that I spoke with knew how to rank a site in a competitive niche or to convert the traffic to paying clients. There is no telling how much money I would have thrown away if I didn’t already have an SEO background.
- The best SEO consultants are either doing SEO for their own sites or are too expensive for most law firms. SEO is time-consuming, big money is involved, and the sharpest talent gravitates toward the highest fees. The best consultants are either in-house or outside the budget of most small and medium law firms.
My goal for this blog is to fill this gap for small and medium-sized law firms. My experience has proven that the web is a great leveler among firms. A smaller firm with a focused niche can outdo much larger firms with more resources. It all comes down to knowing how to drive traffic (SEO) and convert that traffic into paying clients (CRO).
I hope to keep this blog authentic, transparent, and, above all, practical. After spending a few months toward the end of 2011 getting the technical stuff in place and stockpiling a few posts, I’m ready to get started. My goal for 2012 is to publish at least twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Feel free to subscribe to my feed and make use of the comments.
About Jack Falconberg
