Nolo's Lawyer Blog

Lawyers: Learn how to increase your online visibility, generate more traffic and get more clients from your website with these top ten tips.

This is the first in a series of posts on the most important things attorneys can do to optimize their websites and increase bottom-line results. Learn how to rank higher in major search engines and drive more qualified traffic to your site by following these simple top ten tips. Here are the four major goals for improving your website:

• Search: Get listed higher on major search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Google
• Traffic: Increase qualified traffic to your website
• Visitors: Get more people to your site and keep them browsing longer
• Convert: Convert site visitors to clients

People search online for good, relevant information, so the most important element of your website would be good, relevant content. Using search-friendly text and key words that help inform potential clients about you and your practice are critical . But what is the best way to create that content and what do I do after I've got all of my information ready?

For now, we'll start with important tips to improve your website, with more detail on each in our upcoming blog posts.

1. Strategy Overview: Do a basic review of your website and online marketing strategy and set realistic goals for improvement.
   
2. Website Analytics: Implement some basic tracking capabilities on your site to measure visitors and traffic, like Google Analytics.
   
3. Website Content: Create good, relevant content and topic-specific articles for your site.
4. Blogs: Create a blog to keep your site fresh and current.
5. SEO: Optimize your site's page titles with relevant keywords so that search engines can better find you.
   
6. SEM & PPC: Consider search engine marketing and Pay Per Click (Google Adwords) advertising.
7. Link Building: Let other sites know you exist and have them link back to your site.
8. Email Marketing: Invite your visitors to join an email list for periodic newsletters about your practice.
   
9. Social Networking: Learn to utilize Linked In, Face Book and Twitter to help drive traffic qualified traffic to your site.
10. Client Intake Form: Convert site visitors to paying clients by adding a simple intake form.

Online marketing, like any form of marketing, is a step-by-step process. Check back with us next week to learn more about how you can improve your online strategy.