Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for Law Firms: A FindLaw White Paper

By FindLaw, 

PART ONE: BASIC SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

What, Exactly, Is Search Engine Marketing?

Search engines are Web sites designed to help Internet users find information throughout the Internet. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask.

Search engine marketing – or SEM for short – is the function of developing, submitting and positioning a Web site within the proper search engines for maximum exposure and effectiveness.

The goal of SEM, like the goal of any client development effort, is to attract more potential clients for your law firm. The goal is not simply to achieve “high rankings.” High rankings for the sake of high rankings do not necessarily translate into new clients for a law firm. For example, a law firm that was ranked #1 on Google for the phrase “governor election” would probably not receive new clients as a result of this ranking. On the other hand, a law firm ranked #10 for “Chicago Illinois bankruptcy attorney” might attract new clients as a result of this ranking.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Most search engines work by combining two processes: phase one, spidering and indexing, and phase two, ranking.

Spidering and indexing. Most search engines have “spiders” (also known as “bots,” as in “robots”) that automatically visit millions of Web sites on a regular basis. When a spider comes to a Web site, it is programmed to collect certain information from that Web site. The process of compiling this information is known as indexing. After looking at billions of Web pages from millions of Web sites, the spider returns to the search engine with its indexed results.

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