Future Searches

The Importance of SEO in the Legal Industry

The legal competitive landscape has changed. Small law firms with a great web presence are now in direct competition with the bigger, legacy firms. Web sites and social media have overtaken “word-of-mouth” or yellow page ads as the best ways to generate leads for attorneys and law firms.

Law firms do understand the importance of having a web site. What some lawyers and law firms don’t understand is the importance of doing an online marketing campaign. Using such essential strategies as search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing, pay per click ads, blogging and geo-targeting, attorneys are discovering the value a solid online marketing campaign can have on their bottom line.

SEO Impact on Attorneys

Lawyers working in the same practice areas need to differentiate themselves from the pack.  For example, personal injury lawyers cover a wide spectrum of cases.  When a prospective client is online searching for an attorney, they will probably not search for a “Personal Injury Lawyer” but for a “San Diego Personal Injury Law Firm” or a “Dog Bite Attorney in San Diego. “ At that time when a prospective client finds you, the value of having great searchable content and relevant Meta data becomes evident.

Twitter Search and Trending Topics

I love Twitter and tweeting in Twitter. Some good things about Twitter are: you don’t need to be a celebrity or anything special to contact with people that you always wanted to, you just say your words to everyone all over the world and people pick you up if they think that you are like-minded or they have an interest in your topics, products etc. It keeps you up-to-date with any topic you choose, helps you extending your network .

Twitter recently added 2 new features to it’s structure. Twitter search and trending topics. Both are in my opinion a must-to-have and will keep more users online.

Twitter search is enabling users to search across global tweets from all around the world, build a fresh timeline of updates based on a keyword or phrase.

Users have the functionality to save their favourite search terms by pressing “save this search” button. Those search terms will be displayed as a link under their search box so they only need to click on the link to execute results.

Drive Traffic to Websites by Current Search Trends

If you have a website or blog, I know that you want to drive big traffic and bring leads, generate some ad revenue or just increase your Page Rank and websites’ value.

One way to drive traffic to your website is following trends and generating posts related with search phrases. There are several ways you can monitor real-time (delays are always possible) search trends such as Google Trends, Twitter and Yahoo Buzz.

Google Trends

Google trends give you approximate popular search patterns. You can see a list of most searched 100 queries. It gives search volume index for each pattern, news articles, blog posts, related searches, peak times and locations. I believe it gives great insight for popular search trends as majority of people use Google for search.

Trend topics by Twitter

Twitter is a “a real-time short messaging service” and has recently added search and trend topics features to users homepages. It gives top-ten popular tweet topics and a great global insight as they say:

“As public tweets fly in from around the globe, we analyze them to detect when certain words or phrases occur with higher frequency. These trending phrases are surfaced in the Twitter home page just under the new search box and they’re updated throughout the day.”