Your website’s success is directly linked to posting quality content regularly. You are either a website wrangler vs. a website whisperer who you hire to post for you.
A wrangler is a do it yourselfer. A whisperer is a website SEO/SEM expert.
Website Wrangler vs. Website Whisperer
Anyone trying to wrangle their own website is probably overwhelmed with posting and adding new content, trying to format pictures. It’s a lot of work.
Lawyers and doctors generally hire website teams to manage online marketing. Time is best spent with clients and in court, depositions, settlements than writing website posts.
Daily Blog Posting
If you know how to post to your website, then you are definitely familiar with the need for security updates. New plugins, WordPress updates. While posting a blog, you may have deleted a few pages by accident. Maybe you posted huge photos and couldn’t size them. Tried to stick a video into a website post and are still waiting for it to show up?
Posting is a serious task and frustrating for non-professionals.
First There’s Social Media
You may have made it through a week of posting daily on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram. Or not.
Next, There’s Video
You may have shot a video in the office and are still trying to get it out of the camera. Maybe you took staff pictures for your website and everyone on the team wants you to retouch them.
In short, posting content to websites can be like herding cats. Worse, web posting takes longer.
The amount of time you’re spending in front of a computer trying to post pictures, stories, video is going to add up. You’re not getting the results you want, so you’re considering hiring an SEO firm.
Hire an SEO Firm
It’s a good idea to hire an SEO firm unless you’re a writer, photographer, videographer and webmaster. You shouldn’t try to handle your own website duties.
Do-it-yourself website work is as effective as a client walking into a courtroom pro se or a homeowner selling their own home or a retiree day trading with their 401(k) funds.
Attorneys know that judges don’t like it when a person represents themself because inevitably, the case will not be handled properly, things will move slowly, and the judge will be called upon to “help.”
No one wants to buy from a DIY homeowner because they don’t know the paperwork involved
The judge is not required to help and a pro se case may very quickly go sideways with an impatient judge. Just as a
Google Doesn’t Go Easy on DIY Websites
Likewise Google won’t go easy on your website when you make mistakes. Websites need a lot of maintenance and need many types of content.
DIYers often do things like stuff keywords into stories and tags. There’s a lot of plagiarism from online sources. There’s poor writing, stock photos, no video and very bad stabs at social media. Poor tactics to use for websites, especially new websites.
Learn Something About SEO
Before you decide on an SEO/SEM company, you’d better understand a little about SEO so that the firm doesn’t talk over your head.
You’ll hear words like algorithm, analytics, posts, ranking, keywords and content, coding. Of course you’ll only be wondering how long it will take. And how much it will cost.
And if those are your only worries you have a lot to learn and you’ll be very disappointed: SEO/SEM takes a long time. It’s not cheap.
What you should know is that the process is complicated, it’s slow, it’s expensive and ALL of your competitors are already working with an SEO company and they’re paying them more.
The firm shouldn’t be telling you anything. They should be asking about what your business does because if you hire them to put “content” on your website, they’d better know a lot about your company. How many doctors are in the practice, how long your medical firm has been in business, what your real estate specialties are and what practice legal practice and medical practice areas you’re going to feature.
Don’t be fooled by someone claiming they can get you to page one of Google in 30 days. That cannot and will not happen. And if it happens once, you risk it all for that one month because those tactics are black hat tactics which can get your domain banned.
OR they’re expensive and they’re using Google AdWords and unless your budget can take it, get ready for And for all the cheapskates looking for a deal…if you’re expecting many thousands of dollars in billable hours, you can expect to spend many thousands of dollars in monthly SEO and SEM fees.
Cheap and Easy Internet Answers
The Internet is many things to many people. One thing it is NOT: easy to understand. The other thing about SEO is that it is expensive.
If you want cheap and easy, then answer one of those SPAM e-mails that’s asking you to try a business you’ve never met and who you’ll only pay $350 a month for SEO.
Go ahead and pay a stranger in another country using your bank or credit card. Best wishes and good luck in getting your website created and managed.
So if you’re looking for cheap and fast, stop reading here and head back to the online searches promising you results for under several thousand dollars a month.
For everyone else, let’s go into the big question: What’s quality content?
What is Quality Content?
Quality content includes written stories, photos, videos that you put onto your website.
That quality content should be:
- 100 percent original
- Specific to your business
- Professional in appearance
- Carefully constructed
- Placed online with design in mind
Quality Written Content
Quality written content sells your business without selling. It’s authentic and it’s about you and your team.
It shares your business story. It explains how you got started. What services do you offer?
Don’t talk about price…and please, skip all that “call me now, come in today” hard sell and instead sit down and write something that’s interesting and relevant to your target audience.
Who’s Your Target?
Your target is twofold: first, it’s your current clients. Second, it’s the clients you know you can bring in because they’re calling you or are relevant to you.
But when you drill down into the demographics, it’s there that you’ll get your answers.
Your target is not you, so don’t write for you, your law firm, your doctor’s office staff. You need to know your audience. Then, you need to figure out what they want to know.
Do they want to know about your education? How many cases you’ve won? How many clients you’ve worked with? How many awards you have?
Or do they want to listen to your war stories. Battles you’ve won, successes you’ve had are a great way to go, but you should not be telling them. Someone else should be sharing your capabilities.
- Clients want to know how you’ll take care of their case.
- Clients want to know who you are when they Google you.
- Clients want to see what you say online and what other people say about you.
- Do you have good reviews? What do the bad reviews say?
- Are you talking about things that matter to them? Not if you’re not posting things on your website.
- They’re not going to go to Instagram to find out what other people say about a doctor.
- Clients are not perusing Facebook to find out if an attorney likes the same movies that they do.
- Clients go to Yahoo, Bing, Google
What do you think they want to know about you? You’d be surprised, shocked, if you heard what your prospective clients want from you.
That’s a lot of responsibility placed on the shoulders of busines owners managing clients, office staff, cases and billable hours.
The final things you should do in figuring out what to do about your website is to read a book on advertising and marketing. Read about public relations, grassroots marketing. Watch YouTube videos to figure out how to post to your website.
Or if you don’t have any time for any of that, then find a company that has the skill and the experience to sell you better than you can sell yourself.
If your advertising is being done well, you wouldn’t be reading this website post because you’d be too busy handling all your new clients.
