Who Are You Hiring to Build Links To Your Website? by Foster Web Marketing
Okay, so you already know how important it is to have an effective search engine marketing strategy in place in order to obtain and keep page one search engine rankings. You’re an attorney, which likely means that you don’t really have the time to go out and build links yourself because you’re spending most of your time in the court room and with clients.
So who do you hire to do so?
Here are a few options and our opinions on each:
1) Have a Paralegal or Junior Attorney in your office do it
You’re already paying them so why not give them another task?
This is the most popular decision when it comes to finding someone to perform routine link building tasks like directory submissions and article distribution, but what about training and research time? It takes a good amount of time and effort to get paralegals and assistants with no experience to know enough about the art of SEO and SEM, and even then are they qualified as experts who can do an effective enough job to increase your search engine rankings?
We’ve also noticed that this route leads to a high turnover rate, as most of the time assistants and paralegals either move on from their link building duties because they’d rather be more involved in the legal aspects of the firm (which is what they went to school for) or because the firm finally realizes that they aren’t Internet Marketing professionals after a few months.
2) Can your Traditional Marketing consultant(s) do this?
Most firms and small law offices have traditional marketing consultants that they go to for their “traditional” marketing needs, whether it be in-house or not. These people surely know enough about SEO and SEM to either do most of it themselves, right?
Well, that depends. From our experience, the marketing consultants are great for certain aspects of web marketing, like serving as contact people for online press releases, helping out with necessary social media tasks, and basically serving as the go-to person for the attorney(s) since they don’t really have the time, but from our experience the traditional marketers don’t know enough about SEO and SEM to create and maintain an effective link building campaign. There are some exceptions, of course, but from our experience the traditional marketers make better project managers who can measure the level of effectiveness of an SEO/SEM campaign than actual “do’ers”.
3) Hire A Freelance SEO/SEM consultant
This is another very popular decision when it comes to finding someone to build links to your website. You can find hundreds of people on Craigslist and freelance websites like Elance, but be very careful of this. Be sure to ask for other websites that they have performed SEO/SEM duties on, and see what types of rankings and back links these sites have.
Also try to make sure that they are actually competitive keywords that the freelancers are using, and aren’t showing you keywords that pretty much anybody could obtain with a few pages of content.
Hiring a freelancer is a good option if they can prove that they know what they’re doing and are effective, but turnaround usually plays a part (the freelancer takes on too many projects or takes a full-time job and suddenly doesn’t have time to dedicate to your project) as does measuring success.
It usually takes some time to obtain number on rankings on search engines because of indexing (usually up to six months), and it’s not easy for you to pay someone every month without seeing some type of return on investment. Be sure to monitor your Google analytics for increases in traffic and keyword visits, and also ask for a detailed breakdown of what links were obtained by the freelancer. If you really want to be sure, check the PageRanks of the sites that the freelancer is obtaining links from and also make sure that they are legal-related or relevant to your location.
4) Hiring an Offshore Web Marketing Company
You likely get contacted by companies from India and other countries overseas that promise you page one rankings for a low monthly fee all the time. This is because the labor in these countries is very cheap and, just like with any other business, outsourcing your project to an overseas vendor can be tempting, especially if they can show results for past clients and are hundreds or thousands cheaper than a company here in the States.
There are a few problems with this. One is the language barrier, not only between you and the company but also the grammar errors that come up while the offshore company provides their link building services on article and press release sites, blogs, forums, etc. You may say to yourself at first “well, I’ll just proofread everything” but that turns into more time than completing the actual work.
Another issue is that most offshore companies use black hat techniques, like obtaining crappy back links that have nothing to do with law or your location. You may not care about this at first when you’re on page one of Google, but if the search engines find out about these sites linking back to yours it’s very likely that your site will be penalized and you’ll be stuck after paying for services that ended up hurting you more than they helped.
Have you ever tried to convince Google to re-index a website with hundreds or thousands of bad inbound links? We have after we tried to help out a few clients who made bad choices when hiring link building “companies”, and it’s near impossible. Long story short: you get what you pay for.
5) Hiring a Web Marketing Company
While it’s true that this is probably the most expensive option, it is usually also the most effective. Hiring trained and proven professionals to handle your SEM and link building campaigns provides a return on investment that most of the previous options do not.
You understand how important your search engine rankings are, and building quality and relevant links is absolutely key to obtaining and keeping these rankings. Are you really thinking about pinching pennies when you know this?
Be sure to check out some of the web marketing’s companies and their search engine rankings before hiring them. Also be sure to follow similar rules that pertain to “hiring a freelancer”, like asking for a detailed work completed report and monitoring the quality of the back links that the company obtains.
Having a web marketing company on your side also pays off when you need web marketing advice, like whether or not certain paid advertising opportunities that are available online are worth the investment, what kind of strategies they can implement to increase traffic conversion, networking and referral opportunities, and more.
There is power in numbers and most web marketing companies already have the necessary resources in place to make your link building and search engine marketing campaign a success, and help you generate more leads, cases, and most of all, money.
Posted Under: link building for attorneys Tags: link building, SEM, SEO
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