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Smith & Smith Attorneys

You may remember the blog article we posted, “Not Your Typical Lawyer Site,” which profiled Smith & Smith Attorneys, a family law practice in Augusta, Georgia. The ladies at Smith & Smith came back to Powerserve with a new goal; they wanted to take the new site to the next level and start driving some organic web traffic to it. Powerserve recommended a locally targeted search engine optimization campaign.

Zeroing in on a local search engine market can be extremely cost effective as compared to a national or global campaign. (National or global campaigns can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the competitive landscape of the targeted key words and phrases). It can also produce very quick results, sometimes taking just a couple of weeks (although, there are no guarantees)! And often times local businesses will find that their competitors are pretty easy to beat in the rankings because their sites may not even be standards compliant, much less search engine optimized.

Our initial analysis of SmithandSmithAttorneysAugusta.com confirmed our suspicion—that the site seemed to be buried in the website rankings by a lot of other sites that, frankly, were winning the search engine game only because no one else was playing. Our first clue was the abundance of directories—not competitors’ websites—that were scoring above Smith & Smith in the rankings; these sites typically score well due to the abundance of semi-relevant content they aggregate. They can also be unseated in their search engine rankings by developing highly relevant content and by using some key SEO techniques.

The end result? SmithandSmithAttorneysAugusta.com jumped from page 6 of the Google search results to the second position on page 1! So anybody who searches the web for family law practices in Augusta, Georgia should arrive at the Smith & Smith Attorney’s website straight away, which also means that their phones are ringing a lot more!

In the movie “Field of Dreams,” Kevin Costner’s character heard whispers of “Build it and they will come.” So, he constructed a baseball field in the middle of nowhere, and remarkably the unexpected happened: People came. With websites, getting people to show up to your ballpark requires a bit more effort.

There is often an expectation that if you have a website, people will find you, you’ll have more business, etc. Traffic (and additional business) may come eventually, but it will not happen overnight. In order for your website to get found, people need to know about it. Some of the ways you can make that happen include search engine submissions, social networking, and pay-per-click advertising.

So, you have a website? Great! Now what? Traffic won’t magically come to you. Search engines might eventually crawl your site if others link to it. Here are a few things you can do to make sure your site is found:

Submit your site to the major search engines:

• Add your URL to Google
• Yahoo! Site Explorer
• Microsoft Live Search URL Submission

While this is certainly not an exhaustive list, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search represent the “Big Three” search engines. Getting listed on these engines is your first, and arguably best, opportunity for search engine-based referral traffic.

Promote your site on social networks. If you use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, make sure your friends know about your site (Don’t spam them, though!). Go to where your customers are. Engage them. Encourage them to visit your site; to use your services.

Google AdWords: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising. Spend money on targeted, keyword-based advertising when you’re first starting out. It could be a while before your site ranks highly in search engine results. PPC ads guarantee a higher-profile placement on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Let’s say you have an automotive repair business and you’re hoping to generate more traffic to your website. You’d like to buy some ads on Google Adwords to be displayed on SERPs. While getting things set up, you select some keywords that you think people might use to find your business. Generic keywords have greater competition; this is why you want to try and be as specific as you can with your keywords. Someone looking for “Automotive Repair Augusta GA” is more likely to be looking for your services versus someone who might be searching for “Automotive Repair.”

Some other things to consider with PPC:

• You’re only charged if someone actually clicks on your ad.
• You can set a maximum daily budget on Google AdWords. Once you’ve spent your budget for the day, your ad will no longer appear in SERPs. (This helps you budget for PPC more efficiently.)
• The more specific your keyword phrase, the less you’ll pay per click (usually).
• The more specific your keyword phrase, the more likely people seeing your ad might be interested in your services.

Traditional Advertising. Make sure your website address is included in all advertising, such as radio, TV commercials, billboards, business cards, newspaper and magazine ads, and even email signatures. Anytime you have the opportunity to tell someone about your site, do it.

Our clients invest a lot of time and resources into creating a top quality site to represent their organization, so now what do we do to begin driving traffic to their site? Ranking high in the search engines is the most common way to ensure the success of your site.

PowerServe has developed a Search Engine Optimization strategy designed to increase your website search engine rankings through a four-pronged approach:

1. Keyword/phrase design
2. Site design and layout SEO compatibility
3. Content optimization
4. Link building strategy.

This strategy is woven into PowerServe’s tactical SEO plan.

After completing a new website design and development project for Greenbrier Family Dental, a dental practice in Evans, Georgia, PowerServe turned our sights toward helping them drive traffic to the site. The goal was to attract new patients, more and more of which are turning to the web to find such service providers. After we implemented PowerServe’s Search Engine Optimization strategy, Greenbrier’s web traffic began to increase sharply almost immediately. It wasn’t long before the client experienced the advantages of their investment:

Just wanted to let you know that yesterday we got our first patient from the SEO you did for us. She said that she searched “dentist evans ga” and we popped right up! Thanks for all your help!Adam Scott, DMD

Visit http://powerserve.net to see more of our website design and software development work.

We’ve been using Google’s Sitemap protocol for a while now, and we were excited to hear that Yahoo! and Microsoft will also be supporting the protocol with their search indexing. Sitemaps.org has more info.