Chapter 2: Search Engine Optimisation - how to win new clients via your website.

A website alone will not win you new clients. You need visitor traffic, and good quality visitor traffic. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN exist to help generate the right traffic to your website, although they prefer you to achieve this by spending money on online advertising (for example ‘Adwords’ and ‘sponsored links’). However search engines will allow websites to be promoted on merit and this is where Search Engine Optimisation comes into play.

This article is not about how to advertise online, which is a subject in its own right, but how to exploit search engines to ensure that the right visitor traffic comes to your website. What rules must you follow, and what technology must be applied, so that online users find your site? As a specialist in particular practice areas, how can you ensure that your firm’s website is listed prominently on a search engine listing?


What is Search Engine Optimisation, and how can it help you?

Search Engine Optimisation is a discipline of website development and focuses on the task of optimising your website to maximise its chances of being highly ranked by search engines. In other words, it is a discipline which makes your website as visible as possible to search engines; the website becomes effectively ‘search engine friendly’. Good search engine visibility is crucial as search engines are the primary means by which online users will find your website.

Search Engine Optimisation is vast subject in its own right, so in this article we limit ourselves to explaining how to improve your website's visibility and ranking through four basic techniques: using relevant content, establishing reciprocal links, including meta tags, and registering your website with search engines.


Using relevant content

To exploit search engines effectively, website copy should strike a balance between being well written for both human visitors and the software ‘robots’ that search engines use to evaluate a website.

Potential clients will search for a law firm or chambers by using search phrases that may include imprecise, lay terms. Your clients are not specialists in law – therefore not necessarily au fait with legalese - so you need to know the mind of your prospective clients if you are to make the best use of search engines to draw them to your website.

The closer you can predict the wording a preferred prospect will use to find your website, the higher the chance they will find you. To direct visitor traffic search engines will need to have found matching phrases on your web pages, so it is clearly important that these search phrases are included in your website copy.

To achieve this, it is highly recommended to have, at least on top-level web pages, copy that is relatively non-technical and targeted at non lawyers. If necessary, copy can become more technical as the visitor delves deeper.

The same copywriting principle applies to other means of content delivery: you can offer authoritative information on your practice areas through articles, newsletters, bulletin alerts, links, blogs, and more.


Links to your website

Links to your website from other websites will bring you traffic and help boost your search engine ranking. Amongst many other considerations, search engines will rate the popularity of your website according to the number and quality of links to your website. Google has an official statement on this matter: “Google…interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A”. Google “ then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives. “

Google's automated search robots jump from page to page on the Internet via hyperlinks. The more sites that link to your website, the more likely it is that Google will list you prominently.

To ensure that your website has the visibility to which it aspires, encourage other, related websites to point to your site. If your website has good incoming links, the ranking of your web pages will increase.


Include Meta tags

Meta tags are information inserted into the ‘header’ area of your web pages, most of which will not be seen by those viewing your pages with a browser. These tags are HTML-coded information that search engines record when crawling your website for information. In their simplest form, meta tags consist of a title, a description, and relevant keywords. Each page of your website should have a different meta tag, so that search engines index each page as different. This will help direct visitors to the right web page.


Register your website

To capitalise on your website’s content, link popularity and meta tags, your website needs be registered with the top search engines - and as many other web sites as possible. The registration process should include:

• Submission to free search engines, including Google, other major search engines/portals, and community and local search engines
• Registration at Findlaw.com, Law.com, and other legal sites
• Exchanging reciprocal links with professional organisations, clients, trade groups, consultants, publishers, educational institutions and other relevant organisations
• To fast-track the website, consider submission to paid search engines including Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Overture, Looksmart and Google Adwords.

An ongoing process

Search Engine Optimisation is an ongoing process. Progress is usually incremental, so results are extremely unlikely to appear until some months have passed. Search engines visit sites at intervals determined by their own algorithms (Google’s Page Ranking gives an indication of frequency: the higher the ranking the more frequent the return visits). It takes time but a virtuous cycle can be achieved: a higher frequency of visits helps give the site a better ranking and a better ranking makes the site more popular. Increasingly popularity helps increase the frequency of visits, which in turn helps boost the ranking. A ceiling will be reached eventually, but one can achieve a lot by understanding the optimisation principles.


You can read more about SEO on our article: Search Engine Optimisation: Dark Art or pure science?


For further information about the contents of this article, or to discuss Search Engines Optimisation, Adword campaigns or online marketing needs, please contact us on +44 (0)20 8871 1330 or email charleslouis.moreau@intendance.com.

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