What is SEO and How Will It Help My Legal Association Management Company?

Search Engine Optimization, better known as SEO, is the process of improving your website to increase visibility when someone searches for products or services that are related to your business in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. SEO is a set of practices designed to help improve the positioning of web pages in an organic search result. The more visible your pages are in search results, the more likely you are to get attention and attract prospective and existing clients to your company. 

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines like Google and Bing use crawlers, sometimes referred to as bots or spiders, that go from site to site to collect information about each page and put them into an index. This “index” is essentially an extensive library where each webpage can be pulled at any given time to help you find what you are looking for. The crawler, or bots, starts from any known page and follows internal links within that site and external links to pages on other sites. The content on each of these pages, plus the context of the links it followed, helps this crawler understand what each page is about and how it is connected to the other pages within the index. 

When someone either types or speaks a question into the search box, the search engine starts using algorithms to analyze the index, taking into consideration hundreds of ranking factors or signals to decide the order the web page should appear in the search results for any given question. These algorithms then pull out what it believes to be the most accurate and useful list of results for that question. The organic results can include anything from a webpage full of text to news articles, images, videos, and even local business listings. The factors that go into these algorithms are ever-changing and evolving to keep up with changing user behavior and advancements in machine learning. Essentially, the algorithm’s job is to surface relevant, trustworthy pages and provide users with a systematic search experience.

Is SEO Important for Marketing?

SEO is an essential part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches each year, usually with the intent to find out more information about specific products and services. Search is generally the primary source of digital traffic for companies and supplements other marketing channels. However, the search results have evolved over the past couple of years to give users more precise information and answers that are more likely to keep users on the search results page instead of driving them to other web pages.

To better understand the value of SEO, let’s break it down into three parts:

1. Organic search results: these are the unpaid listings on a search engine results page that the search engine has decided are the most relevant to the user’s question. Ads (or pay-per-click ads) make up a large portion of many search engine results pages. These ads are typically the first couple of searches you will see when you search something and will have “Ad” next to the URL. Organic search results are distinct from these ads because they are positioned based on your SEO ranking rather than ad bids. You cannot pay for your page to rank higher in an organic search result.
2. Quality of organic traffic: this is how relevant the user and the question they searched are to the content that exists on your website. You can attract all the users you want, but if they are driven to your website because Google or Bing told them you are a resource for personal injury medical treatment when you are actually a personal injury law firm, those users are likely going to leave your webpage without ever completing a conversion. The highest-quality traffic includes only users (or visitors) who are seriously interested in the products, information, or services that your website offers.
3. Quantity of organic traffic: this is the number of users who actually reach your site due to an organic search. Users are much more likely to click on a search result that appears at the top of the search engine results page, which is why it is so important to use your SEO plan to rank relevant pages as high as you can. The more high-quality visitors your website attracts, the more likely you are to see a spike in valuable conversions.

It is important to note that while other digital marketing practices such as pay-per-click advertising, social media management, and email marketing are frequently related to SEO, these other methods are typically outside of the scope and definition of traditional search marketing. 

SEO is crucial because it helps keep the search results fair. It decreases the ability to manipulate these results so that websites appearing for each search are there because they deserve to be there. Hard work and an appealing website correlate with high search engine rankings, so if your website meets these criteria, you will have a much better chance of your website showing up in the results. 

If you are dedicated to increasing your search engine optimization but do not know where to start, Legal Associations Management is here to help. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help make your website grow and increase your overall user traffic. Stay tuned for more informative blog posts about SEO and other topics.