I am a sole practitioner. I like being a sole practitioner. And as a sole practitioner, I do most office-related tasks myself—some of you out there can sympathize! Answering my phone, drafting my own motions, purchasing office supplies, have all become de rigueur. I have always taken pride in being self-sufficient and I have grown to love the individualism and autonomy working by oneself will naturally cultivate. Leaping technological advances in the devices we now use have dramatically increased what we can accomplish on our own and have enabled me to run my business efficiently and with very little overhead—and not always tethered to my geographical building!

Every now and then though, I find it necessary to outsource tasks that are, frankly, above my pay grade. Search engine optimization is certainly one of those tasks. If you are anything like me, knowing what “SEO” meant, or that it was even a term, was somewhere ahead on the learning curve! I say learning curve here because when I first endeavored to examine my website’s efficacy, I really did not know where exactly to begin—but I was certain I needed to educate myself on the process. As a natural extension of that notion, I further thought that if I could get a practical tutorial in the process, I would be in a better position to manage and market my professional services. The only thing I knew to do at the beginning was to ask for help. That was the foundation.

Look, I’m not unmechanical and in fact, I can figure how most things technical work if I put in the time. But business and family don’t take breaks and time is a precious commodity. I am reminded of advice my mother-in-law gave me once and which I think is spot on here, “I’ve found that the best way to buy something, Michael, is to pay for it.” Sage advice.

I have a former client I have kept in touch with who is in the business of developing and managing websites. We spoke and almost immediately I was inundated with questions I could barely understand, let alone adequately answer. We decided a sit down at my office was the best way to approach the ask. When we met, he patiently explained—and I slowly learned—what was required. He was accommodating enough to run some preliminary diagnostics on my website and get back to me with the results. This was the rough framing.

Full disclosure here: I am not a developer and this article is not a technical piece—it is in no way a comprehensive treatise on website strategy, preparation or deployment. I am still in the process of building the proper structure. Rather, it is just an attempt at providing the reader with a baseline understanding, through my ongoing experience, of what to consider when looking to optimize your website’s effectiveness. In other words, it’s how not to look like a complete imbecile, as did I, in front of your developer, when or if you have that talk.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Assuming that you have a website, it has a presence on the internet. It occupies a digital space and can be found by people using the web. Unless someone already has your website address, they find it using words that describe what they are looking for, usually called “search terms.” Ultimately, the goal of your presence on the web is to increase the number of visitors to your website and, hopefully, the amount of business you get. When someone types in search terms, they are typing them into a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) For that person’s search to lead to you, your website needs to be seen and ranked by the search engine. In order for it to be seen and ranked, with a placement ideally on the first page of that search engine’s results page, it must include certain terms, legal and otherwise. Search engine optimization, or SEO, means designing your website so that search engines find and rank your site high in the list of results when your potential clients are searching for a lawyer they would like to hire. This is where it gets tricky, because the process by which the search engine directs traffic comes from a proprietary method of analyzing websites for potential usefulness to the searcher. A specific collection of snippets of text and metadata, aligned and positioned the proper way, ensure your website obtains a high “click-through rate” from the results the search engine lists. The right information as it passes through the search engine’s complicated and highly intelligent algorithm gets you placed on the first page of a potential client’s search results. Still with me? Let me put it another way: while there are many considerations when designing your website, if you want potential clients to find you, creating content that gets noticed and which is ranked high by search engine algorithms is a key requirement.

So What Do I Actually Do to Rank High? Or How Do I Put the O in SEO?

Diagnostics First

Remember how my website developer ran some diagnostics on my website? We looked through the various results and found something interesting: While I was ranking reasonably well for searches conducted on a desktop platform, I was woefully underrepresented on searches from mobile or edge devices. In fact, I was in the bottom 10%, which meant I was nearly invisible on a mobile device unless someone already knew my name and was just looking for the address. Since most searches are currently conducted from mobile devices, I quickly realized my website required panoptic surgery! Knowing this information was instrumental in understanding how to build out. We needed a “Mobile First” strategy.

Keywords and Onsite Optimization

Search engines look for content that is most relevant to the search query. Keywords are instrumental in the process. If your site has certain keywords arranged in specific order, you’ve improved your chances of being noticed. But that, my friends, is the special sauce. Other than the developers at Google (and they’re not revealing those confidences), nobody knows with certainty how a search engine seeks out and ranks its target.

But certainty is not needed. Many smart folks, including web developers, have a pretty good idea what works and what doesn’t. They know that search engines look for keywords as well as for original text and images. And the engines have a precise aim: to rank high, you can’t be too technical, but not too spammy either. For instance, given all the words on your site, a search engine may only be looking for 4% of them in a proper sequence somewhere within your site’s ecosystem. Artificial intelligence hard at work here. It’s what a peacock might clearly see in a fan of feathers that is all but invisible to the uninitiated. A good developer can sort out and create that appropriate bundle of content based on your practice and what you want your website to achieve. This is what’s known as onsite optimization: choosing the content on your own website to improve your search engine ranking. You could call it getting the walls up and roof on in your buildout.

I also learned that you can be more proactive than waiting for someone to search for the right combination of terms for a search engine to run a query “scramble” on your site, where it analyzes your site for relevance. You can submit a site map (a condensed version of one’s site and its content) directly to search engines for them to analyze ahead of time to improve your site’s chances of being noticed.

Offsite Optimization

Since there’s onsite optimization, it will come as no surprise that offsite optimization is also a thing. Once you have sorted out and built into your website the onsite content, you and your developer can then begin zeroing in on the offsite target. Offsite content refers to third-party websites that have information or documents you’ve generated, either reposted or otherwise. According to my developer, Google loves this stuff. Google scans these postings and is capable of marrying the keywords found in these alternate arenas to your online signature. This very article is a good example of content I developed but which is being hosted on another site. A search engine will now identify my content on the Marin County Bar Association site and rank my website higher because it understands and has factored into its algorithm the merit of that other site, which reflects on my website. If it is further reposted, even better! The more of that one can generate, the more improved the result. But beware if the content is not wholly original. Google, for example, deploys a sifter of sorts which can determine if you “borrowed” text from another author. Remember hearing about those professors who had software that could and would be used to scan for plagiarized content? Well, it’s real—only here at least, they’ll just degrade your ranking! You have now gotten into the finish work.

Offsite optimization also includes your social media presence. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and many others are monitored by Google and other search engines to better develop a holistic view of your web presence. Of note, YouTube happens to be the second-largest search engine platform, behind Google. Video tutorials are a really great method for illuminating your services. [Editor’s Note: See Mary Cary’s article in this issue on using video in your marketing!] Google likes to see your website linked to these apps and channels. Again, the more relevant the exposure, the better for visitor traffic to your website.

Other Things You Can Do: New Content and Advertising

Search engines, like people, like new stuff. Old is boring (I take issue with search engines on this point!) The more dynamic and changing your site is, the higher your ranking. Which means that you need to be producing new content for it on an ongoing basis. You can hire a professional provider who can create content for your site. Most large companies have enormous budgets for this type of marketing, with individuals who churn out content aimed at what they think prospective customers or clients are interested in. But these content outfits can be expensive and as a sole practitioner, likely not the right way forward. However, that means that the content is to be generated and provided by, wait for it…yours truly. I’m in the process of figuring out the best way forward on this front.

One can also pay for advertising, including for placement at or near the top of the results of particular searches using particular search engines. (In other words, instead of doing some of this SEO work, you simply pay Google directly so that your website is at the top of the results, but marked as an ad.) There are various ways to structure a campaign, but generally you would pay to be placed in front of your target audience. In addition to the search platform, Google offers advertising through display, video, and app platforms. Again, these are pay-to-play options and if your budget is tight, this might be further down the road.

Where I Am

I have tried to set out the factors I have been introduced to that have helped me better understand how the digital landscape is laid out and how “the system” finds the professional me. As I mentioned earlier, this is all a work in progress and I certainly have not mastered the art of optimizing my website…yet. I am reminded each time I talk with my developer friend that I have quite a ways to go! But I hope that the basics I have offered here are helpful ways you will consider in making the move to expand your digital footprint and ensure that your services are not only recognized, but placed in such a way that you—rather than your competition—get the “clicks.”