Thursday, February 05, 2009

Get local with Google and Yahoo

Back to basics. From the research that I have done, people who search for things on the web, search by business type and location. This is no different for searches for lawyers or law firms. I review the web reports of my clients and see a lot of searches that my look like "DWI lawyer Texas" or "bankruptcy attorney Albany".
Having a great website with relevant content and good SEO will help your firm's website capture some of these searchers.
There is also a free and easy way to capture these potential clients through Yahoo and Google local listings.

For Google, go to: http://www.google.com/local/add and add your firm. You can add your website, address, phone number, hours of operation, types of law practice, what payments your firm accepts etc. You can even upload a logo. The whole process takes no more than 5 minutes. Below is a sample search "family lawyer San Antonio" I did on Google. You can see all of the local listings of law firms at the top of the search results! This trumps organic search engine marketing and is absolutely free.

The same can be done on Yahoo! at http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php

This is free, and local.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is such an overlooked strategy. We have found geo-targeting produce huge returns on our search marketing dollars. You are absolutely right in that local is especially beneficial to lawyers.

Legal Marketer said...

Great point Gyi. Lawyers are limited in the geographic area they can market to because they usually are only licensed in one or two states. Also, local "knowledge" of judges, juristictions, regulations, laws etc can be important for some areas of law ie criminal and real estate law.

Elizabeth said...

Awesome, thank you! I'm glad I found your blog and have bookmarked it. You have lots of good tips.

Legal Marketer said...

Thanks for the kinds words Elizabeth. I try to keep each post focused, to the point, and actionable. Getting local with Yahoo and Google is an quick an easy thing to do. I don't want to give any heavy duty assignments that no one has time to do.

Legal Marketer said...

Elizabeth, by the way, I checked out your blog. Very informative and relevant. You may want to let other's comment on your blog though and help build a community.

Elizabeth said...

Randy, thanks for the head's up. I'm new to blogging and was unaware that readers could not post their comments. Appreciate it!

Legal Marketer said...

Elizabeth, no problem. I do recommend that you set up your blog to "moderate" any comments. This means that you have to approve any comments to you posts. This will keep any spammers and malcontents at bay.