Legal Marketing & PR

Law Blog SEO: the Good and the Bad

By Amy Derby

Which Kind of SEO Do You Want on Your Lawyer Blog?

My last post (Is SEO Killing Your Law Firm Blog?) has gotten me a few emails from folks asking where I draw the line between good SEO and bad. It’s a fine line, but my boilerplate answer is that good use of SEO doesn’t interfere with your readers’ experience.

Good SEO

You use keywords in your blog post’s title so folks can find you. For example, if you’re writing a post about Company X’s bankruptcy, you title it “Company X Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filed in Illinois” rather than “New Bankruptcy Case Filed”. It makes sense to do this so folks googling you will find you; that’s a good idea.

Your post might be a few paragraphs long and perhaps uses the phrase “Company X filed Chapter 11″ and “Company X bankruptcy” — BUT you use those phrases naturally, so that your visitors reading experience isn’t disrupted.

Bad SEO

Bad SEO would be if you went through a keyword search tool and made a list of 25 different variations of strings folks might search for, and you wrote your post so that you included most of these (possibly including misspellings for the sake of picking up the traffic).

Rather than a natural read, folks are now reading stuff like “Company X Chapter 11 bankruptcy filed Monday in Delaware came to no surprise for investors anticipating that Company X bankruptcy would happen. Company X bankruptcy petition was filed in the Northern District of Delaware. Company X voluntary petition can be downloaded here.” Who wants to read that?

Have you seen this type of thing? (I know I have!) What’s your reaction when you see it?

Full post as published by Law Firm Blogger on November 17, 2008 (boomark / email).