Online Legal Marketing: If You Do Only One Thing

As a lawyer, it's likely you barely have time to have lunch, let alone, build a comprehensive online presence for your practice. From keyword research, to web design, to advertising, to search engine optimization, there are a variety of techniques, tools, and skills that take a lot of time to develop.

However, if you had to choose one thing to do online, I would recommend that you write. Ultimately, the content that you publish online is the most critical piece of developing your professional reputation.

After all, this is what your prospective clients will see and what will eventually motivate them to contact you, or move on to your competitor.

Your writing can take a variety of forms. It can come in blog posts, tweets, answering questions, status updates, guides, newsletters, and a variety of other web-based publishing media.

My advice is to set aside as much time as you can to writing. Even if you are only able to dedicate an hour or two per week, my bet is that over time you will start to see some results from your efforts. These may include increased traffic to your website, other people sharing what you've written online, and eventually, people reaching out to you regarding your practice.

While there's a lot more to internet marketing than simply writing, publish content is the foundation for everything else.

Link Building vs Link Attracting

As Google states in their webmaster guidelines:

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. 

Which has in turn created an entire industry built around building new links to websites. Unfortunately, this is an upside down approach to SEO.

Instead of focusing on building links, you should be focusing on ways to attract more links. In order to do that, you need to understand how links are naturally created online.

Needless to say, one can imagine literally thousands of examples of why something is linked to online. Perhaps it gets linked to because it's useful. Perhaps it gets linked to because it makes someone laugh. Perhaps it gets linked to as an example of what not to do. When you really boil it down, attracting links is about finding ways to motivate people to link to your content.