Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key ingredient to any law firm’s marketing efforts. Lawyer videos, if used properly, can greatly enhance your SEO, and help bring more visitors to your firm’s website. Keep reading for an SEO primer, with a focus on lawyer videos.

The importance of SEO

Your firm probably invested a lot of time and money in its website. But like any shiny new business facility, it needs people to be able to find it before that business can start turning a profit.  With SEO, you’re attempting to accomplish two things: one, known as on page optimization, is to edit every aspect of your website with an eye to increasing your search engine ranking; and two, known as off page optimization, is to demonstrate how popular your website is by getting large quantities of external websites to link to your own. Understanding the algorithms that the search engines use to determine their rankings is the key to doing on and off page optimization well, and moving your website up to that all-important first page of search results.

Off-page optimization

Off-page optimization takes not only the number of websites that link to your own, but also the quality of those websites, and the relevance those websites have to your own. For example, if you are a talk show host on a local cable access television station with your own website, getting a friend with a personal website to link to yours will mean a small uptick in ranking. Getting Oprah to link to your website from hers will cause a huge jump for you. Why? Because Oprah’s website is both incredibly popular, and very related to your own. This aspect of SEO is where lawyer videos come in.
Lawyer videos and off page optimization

Informational lawyer videos hold a lot of appeal to a variety of websites. The legal community, after all, is a large one, with any number of legal nonprofits, legal services, bar associations and CLE providers littering the Internet. Many of these groups are anxious to provide quality content to their website visitors and are just as interested as you are in optimizing their search engine results. By sending your lawyer videos around to these organizations, you’ll be giving them a valuable product they can use on their website, and optimizing your backpage links at the same time. Here are some other ways to use your videos:

1. Purchase space on an attorney video directory. Directories like www.viewmylawyer.com host lawyer videos from a variety of law firms so that people who need legal assistance can make educated decisions about who they want to contact about representing them—kind of a modern, video-based Yellow Pages for lawyers. Like the Yellow Pages of old, it’s a great way to get your firm out in front of prospective clients—and you’ll improve your search engine ranking in the process. 

2. Upload to YouTube. It’s the third most widely viewed website online, and will put your videos in front of a broad audience. Plus, if people like your videos, they’ll have an easy time sharing them with their friends and associates thanks to YouTube’s relationships with social networking websites.

3. Put your lawyer videos on social networking sites. Speaking of social networking, this will improve your online presence and spread the word about your firm through your social networks.