Surviving in the age of digital race has become quite challenging, knowing to prosper one must go the distance beyond competitors in the industry. It’s kind of a tale that brings tortoise and a rabbit into action, again and again. There are two ways to picture a win-win situation: either run so fast that your rivals can never catch you or go slow but never stop; things will change ultimately.
Law firms have taken the digital aspect into serious consideration and the reason why there is a severe competition among the black and white attire wearer, to outpace each other for ranking on top of the search engines, which are the regal thrones of the modern-time class division.
It’s tough to manage for the attorneys and advocates who aspire to get a broad exposure and score maximum cases for their business benefit. No one has been blessed with four or more hands; thus, human configuration limits the ability of an individual. A person is known for expertise in one matter, not many. An attorney can’t have access to the deeper details of digital marketing, so they look into the SEO services for lawyers. Lawyers practicing and effective in Walnut Creek, California face a pile of marketing agencies and suffer to select the best for their means. A wide variation across the demands in terms of marketing aspects compartmentalize the marketers into a number of services associated with digital marketing.
What makes an agency a sound and healthy fit for your law firm should go through many filter tests to surface up. Those filters brand an SEO agency as top and worst. Let’s explore:
Prepare a seed list
The search for a perfect and top SEO agency starts with preparing a seed list. This seed list should comprise of the possible agencies you want to target in the first go. It can be on the basis of SEO-specific, vicinity, experience, cost, and their way of understanding your business. Keep the process simple and don’t take the load at this moment. Adding a company to your list doesn’t mean that you’re promising and handing over your project at once.
Also, it never means you have to go through the step of getting a quote from them. It’s just the first lap of the race when you’re familiarising yourself with the racetrack. Now, here comes two options to choose from—if a law firm does not understand how to indulge in the process, it can go for selecting a pre-made list of agencies, and if a company has experience of many innings in the digital arena, it has power and strength to face the little hurdles and conduct its own search to invent a new recipe.
Option 1. Following the online lists
The internet is bundled with such lists that can fusillade a ton load of choices for your ‘top SEO agency for lawyers’ search.
Option 2. Doing your own labor
Your decision to make a hyper-specific seed list relieves you from the pain of collecting information from never-ending sources. These agencies match your tailored requirements and yield improved results in a long-term.
Various things to factor here are the locality of the firm and affordability. The early picks help you in placing the right keywords when searching on the internet. To find the agency that you have finalized in your vicinity, you can search the terms like “SEO agencies in [your locality].” One another factor that’s really helpful is deciding on the basis of local SEO, technical SEO, niche SEO, and small business SEO.
Next important step is to short down your list. Get started!
A scrutiny of each agency’s website
There are four main pages—home, blog, about, and testimonial—to target when assessing a website. A shortlisted website is worth your time only if it passes the litmus test for all four pages.
Homepage
A website is a window to how an agency addresses its services to prospects. At the first glace, you should spot company name, contact details, and imageries reflecting some insights into the services you seek. These three things show how excited a company is to show off its ownership for services.
If a correlation exists between you and the agency, you will settle on that search. If the homepage doesn’t exhibit the first amazing impression, delete that agency off your list.
SEO is a big deal. If a company has not its own website in control, how could it promise to serve you? You understand the idea, right?
About Page
It doesn’t show much information, but it helps you cut down options in preparing the seed list. An about page displays the agency’s happy employees and its accomplishments. Pictures and videos of happy customers add to the company’s placement into the seed list. This page tells a lot about how an agency manages the work. It could be data-driven results, in-depth analysis, consistent reporting, statistics checking, and collaboration.
If an agency has won an award in SEO field, it’s there as a proof of its outstanding approach. An award tells a lot about hundreds of extra hours of efforts put into the contest than the others who failed in such an attempt. If a company opens fine details, it means it has less to hide than those companies who wrap up the description in generics only. About Page is a symbol of trust, and it’s the perfect way to shortlist an agency.
Testimonial Page
A testimonial page is an ultimate thing you should be looking for when scratching the agencies off your list. It shows how an agency treats its existing and old customers. It takes quite a lot of time to collect valuable feedback from happy customers. If an agency has its testimonial page filled with a lot of positive reviews, it means that the agency has put tremendous effort into its way of exercising the work, to collect good ratings. To check the originality of the customers, run a background check.
No smoke and mirror: The number tells the success story here. If testimonials are less than 50 or 100, choose the one which leads in the figure. In most cases, a happy client leaves a good review. If not, the agency hasn’t fulfilled their expectation. Here, the type of endorsements plays an important role. The thing you’re looking for is evident to you. In case you locate no such thing, scratch its name off the list.
If there is simply name and no company or link, it’s obviously faking. LinkedIn and Google are great sources to check authenticity. If you find no trace of any such person or company existing in this world, the agency has hired those names from the planet Mars. You get the puzzle, right?
Blog Page
Blogs state the authenticity of an agency in a domain. If an agency is not bringing the latest trends, insights, data, and information to its customers and audience, it’s trying to put less effort.
Especially for an SEO agency, the role of blog page becomes paramount. So, if you locate the latest changes in SEO landscape, an agency is up to date with what’s happening in the world and if not, that agency is not aware of what’s happening around.
It would end up ruining your investment and won’t find the true value for your dollar. Here, consistency is the key. A weekly or biweekly post makes blog current, informative, and latest news loaded. The agencies which undermine the value of blogging is not suitable to get shortlisted.
Test SEO strength of the agency
Several online tools come here in play, to help you with evaluating the one who could be your associate. For example, Moz and Ahrefs are free great tools that unleash the inside story of an SEO agency. You can choose either a paid or unpaid version, based on your decision of shelling out money on your research. If you can’t afford the paid way, Google, as always, helps you in your mission.
How to test SEO strength?
Test 1: Brand name search
Start by searching the brand name on Google. If the company itself has not its name on the first page of Google, rest is your decision.
Test 2: Major Keywords Search
An SEO agency should get located for major keywords like top SEO agency in [city name]. After all, these keywords are the gateway for possible clients like you to locate it. If a company doesn’t rank for major keywords, consider hiring some other agency. Keywords bring customers to any website. If an agency has not its website ranked, there exists no chance where you can stand with number one rank on Google.
Test 3: Minor Keyword Search
Don’t go hunting after every minor keyword. No agency takes these minor keywords into consideration. Keywords like “marketing statistics,” and “marketing infographic” are taken lightly when promoting brand awareness. It depends on the company’s strategy how it reads these keywords affecting its reputation.
If a company has planned to go the organic way to rank, it’s not possible for it to rank for every keyword. If you don’t find a keyword, placed on their website, ranking on Google, it depends on how deeper you want to go to shortlist the number one. Keep it on the list but when the competition gets fierce, go for withdrawing it.
The effort that you put into digging out your best match goes long-term, bringing you success and business profit. If you ask any SEO expert what method is recommended for arranging the seed list, he/she would advise you go the customized way. But then comes the time constraints and other factors into the picture. Based on the resources, time, and your strategy to rank your law firm, you can go any way that best matches your preferences. SEO is hard but not impossible. If you get the right SEO partner for your law firm, the success would rain. But if you lose at the very starting, you will have to go a long way to unearth what you could have accomplished in the starting.