Why do most SEO or website development projects literally turn into HOSTAGE SITUATIONS where you have a gun to your head, an unfinished website, or an SEO company that owns your website and/or it’s content?
Because attorneys who know little about marketing become victims and hostages of most SEO and Website Developer Companies.
91% of all attorneys don’t know:
- If they own their website domain name (www.yourname.com)
- If they control their own hosting account (a host is the company that puts the files that make up your website on their computer and make it available on the internet for all to see)
I’m not kidding.
Here’s what happens countless times, to tens of thousands of attorneys:
Their 1,2,3 year contract with web company X is expiring, and they decide little to no work was done, or they want a new website design, or they’re frustrated few to no calls are coming in from their website.
They call up their web company, leave a voicemail with their account representative (that cute blonde lady who sold them on the agreement way back when), and wait for an answer.
Days or a week passes. No answer. So you send an email and leave another voicemail, and a response finally comes.
“When you signed up, we provided your website name and the content.If you want to cancel, you’ll have to ‘buy out’ your website for $6,000 – $15,000 or you’ll have to do a new website.”
WTF?
Here comes the hostage situation. Now you get frantic.
Wait a minute? Who controls my email accounts? Who owns my website What about all those articles, Superlawyers or AVVO badges, testimonials, Facebook and Twitter buttons, and content on my site? What about my google maps listing?
What the hell is going on here? You mean all of that will SHUT OFF when I cancel my contract with you guys and I have to BUY BACK MY OWN STUFF?
WTF?
These guys told me they’d do A,B and C and get me all these clients, but not much happened. Everytime someone calls, it’s another damn solicitor from another web or SEO company.
Now what the heck do I do?
GET A BASIC MARKETING EDUCATION. NOW.
Let me pull back the curtain of SEO and website marketing for you…
If you don’t own your own domain, your hosting account, your email accounts, google maps, twitter, facebook, google pay per click, etc…
If you don’t own and CONTROL every single account associated with Your marketing, you’re a hostage situation waiting to happen.
Any company that demands you use their BS dashboard to look at your stats or that you can’t own your own accounts IS LYING YOU TO, plain and simple.
The day you get annoyed, disenchanted, or frustrated with your Current SEO or web marketing company is the day you can change the Passwords to access all your stuff and then sit back and wait for THEM To freak out, NOT YOU.
You have control, NOT THEM.
If you don’t set up tracking to accurately determine in a particular Website, vendor, or marketing channel is working for you, you’re blinding yourself to what’s going on, which could be absolutely nothing.
You’re again giving up your power. You can’t measure success or failure.
If you don’t understand even what SEO (search engine optimization) or What hosting and domain names are, you are giving up your power.
You are a future marketing victim.
Let’s talk briefly about SEO and what it entails…
1. Content (articles on your website)
2. Links to your site from other relevant sites
(1) What is content and why is it important?
Google controls hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce. Literally.Google’s job is to show the most relevant, specific, targeted, useful information to millions of people “googling” questions daily.
Google is the gatekeeper to its own search results, which is essentially online real estate.
If I “google” { Criminal Defense Attorneys in Boston } which website shows up 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5000000000th ?
How does google determine which website is the most relevant to what I type in, in descending order of importance?
It uses spiders, which are computer programs that scour the internet, Harvesting the words and sentences that appear on various websites.
The more useful, interesting, relevant words, sentences, articles you Have on your website, the bigger your “net” is that you cast out into the internet for searchers’ queries to get caught in. The more that Google’s spiders and feast upon and bring back to the hive.
So content really is king on the internet.
If you have a cobweb-covered website with 14 articles that have never been added to over the past year+, you’re not going to get many searches from google – maybe 1 or 2 a day.
If you have dozens and eventually 50, 100, 200 articles on your site that talk about all the aspects of your practice areas, you’ll get far more google searches and do a million times better, garnering 20, 30, 50, 100, 200 searches a day.
Your phone will ring daily instead of growing cobwebs on its own.
(2) Links from other websites to yours:
The other side of the coin is how “popular” or “respected” your website is. Other sites show their respect and implied recommendation to visit your site by linking to it.
You know that blue highlighted text that you can click onto go to another page or another website? That’s a link.
Google looks at the content on the sites it can show when someone searches, but it also ranks them based on who’s the most popular and authoritiative – i.e. who has the most QUALITY links, not just the most links.
So that’s the 2nd job of SEO – get relevant, useful, quality links from other websites to show that yours is a worthwhile destination.
I could go on for a LONG time about SEO, but that’s a subject for another time.
Work with me as an equal, not as a victim or hostage on a month to month basis for SEO or website development.
You’ll get a much-needed education along the way when you call me and we start working together.
Richard Jacobs
Author: “Secrets of Attorney Marketing
Law School Dares Not Teach”
(now available on Amazon)
Speakeasy Authority Marketing
Call me: <888> 225 – 8594