Matt answers the question “What are some SEO tactics to drive organic traffic?” This interview was conducted by Steve Fretzin for The Origination Station, the top business development e-training for attorneys.

Transcript:

Steve: So Matt, when you mention SEO, what are some of the tactics that attorney should be thinking about to optimize how they get natural searches?

Matt: That’s a great question. There is kind of two sides of SEO, there is on-page SEO and there is off-page SEO or it’s called on-site or off-site SEO. On-site SEO is basically improving the quality of your website and making sure that Google can index your content properly in order to drive ranking for your target keywords. Off-site SEO can be things like building links, having listings in directories; it’s essentially getting links from other websites into your website. And you want links from quality sources.

Steve: So for example I am writing for Chicago Law and they are linking back to my website so that would be considered an outside link?

Matt: Yes, and that’s a great link. Anytime we are talking about a link from a source that is trusted in the industry, that’s the type of a link that you want back in your website and that can help tremendously with gaining rankings for the keywords that you’re targeting.

Steve: So in addition to the internal stuff that is on the website, people should really looking to put articles in other places or get partnership with other groups? Maybe expand on that.

Matt: Exactly. So you want links from other groups, associations or even guest posting – blog posting on other websites can be a great source of links. But you know we talk about link building, one thing you want to avoid, and a mistake that I often see attorneys make is that when you’re building links you really want to take the time to build links from credible sources. If you hire an agency that builds you a lot of spammy links from not trust worthy sources, I have seen attorneys before where they have a bunch of links from like overseas gambling websites, that doesn’t do anything for you. Google can actually ding you for having that sort of link. Link building, it’s just one piece though, and even before I would explore link building for attorneys, I will really look into to making sure the website is healthy. There’s a lot of tools that you can use that will essentially scan your website and tell you and grade you and from a scale of 0-100 on how well your website is currently optimized. If you just Google SEO Audit Tools there’s a bunch and I recommend using more than one or you can hire an SEO consultant that would perform an audit for you. Kind of a step one in your SEO process should be just to make sure you have a healthy website from Google perspective.