How to Rank Higher in Search Results: Your Next Steps After a Website Launch
By Peter Boyd on April 8, 2016 in SEO
Congratulations on your new website launch! So, why are you not #1 for your key practice area in your city? Good question. Let’s explain what it will take to rank high and where you can start.
What Search Engine to Focus On?
Google is the dominant search engine provider. They have a worldwide 67 percent market share according to NetMarketShare and a 64 percent market share in the U.S. according to Comscore. Bing is in second place with about 21 percent of the market. Our own traffic pegs Google at a higher level at about 70 to 80 percent. Suffice it to say, Google is the dominant search engine that you want to focus on today.
What Does it Take to Rank High?
Google wants to provide the best search results to its audience. It decides what the best search result are based on 200+ factors. In short, it comes down to relevancy and authority. You build relevancy by having quality content on your website that answers the visitor’s questions and provides your user with value. You build authority by having links from trusted websites linking to your website (not you linking to them). So, write something that is better than your competition and get quality links from as many other resources as possible online.
About Quality Links
Not every link is created equal. You don’t want to sign up for spam links, link networks or sites that are shall we say…questionable in nature. You want links from newspapers, education, government websites, vendors you trust, blogs, social media, and other trusted sources. See detailed examples in the blog post below.
About Quality Web Content
Not all content is equal either. Put simply, you should be writing the most relevant article on each of your practice areas. An average page of content is 500 words in length. However, everyone is doing that now. We suggest you write 2,000 words and become the authority on a specific topic. What!? How can you write that? It is actually easier than you think.
Describe what the practice area is about, explain how you can help, share cases you have assisted with and detail how you resolved them. On each page, answer every possible FAQ about that practice area. Need help on topic ideas? Try this: Go to Google and start typing in a search. Google will suggest ideas as you type in your practice area and those are specific queries other users have searched for in the past! Write on those topics.
Where Can I Get Links?
We have resources for your firm to start with, for those DIY experts.
- You can start with our list of the top links to obtain.
- You can reach out and claim all your social media profiles at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest (and start posting).
- You can claim all your local listings via a nice Moz Local tool that costs $84 per year.
- Finally, you can ask an expert (like our team) on what more you can do. We can get you into a plan to start earning links once the above steps are all complete.
If you are not a DIY person, just give us a ring. We have packages available to build links and write content.
So, What’s Next?
Keep writing and keep building links. Your goal should be to turn your website into the largest hub of content about your practice area. We are calling this idea the Law Hub and you can read more about it on our blog. You should plan on writing for at least an hour weekly to improve your website content.
You need to start somewhere, so we suggest getting every link that is listed in the blog post above. I would also suggest getting a social media profile setup and active. Finally, register all your local citations so that you have a chance to appear in the map search results. You need to start somewhere and the steps above are the beginning point of our search engine optimization campaigns. We estimate it will take about 20 hours of work initially to setup, so plan accordingly.
If you need help building links or writing content, let us know. It is what we do all day long.
