Marketing your law firm online means one thing to every attorney I know – get to the top of the search engines, ideally in the organic (unpaid) part of the index.  Being in first place means getting the lion’s share of search traffic for your keywords of choice, guaranteeing you dominance in your online legal marketing efforts.

But the reality is that there are tens of millions of web pages that are competing for that top position.  Other lawyers, self-help guides, legal directories and the like are all clamoring for that same brass ring.

That’s where the big-money companies come in to help you in the onerous and arcane task of marketing your law firm.  Large and small firms that promise to get you on page one of the Google search engine results page for any term you choose.  I’m pretty sure we’ll see a bunch of them at the NACBA convention in San Francisco at the end of April, and every other legal conference will find the same story played out over and over again.

Promises with money, that’s what they are.  Give us a lot of money and we’ll get you where you want to be.  We’ll do everything when it comes to marketing your law firm online.  Link-building, on-site optimization, pay-per-click, pay-per-lead – it’s all a variation on a theme.

Don’t worry about actually (gasp) putting relevant and useful information on your site.  All we need you to do is write us a fat check and we’ll do all the marketing your law firm needs.

They play on your fears, and on your lack of information.  You’re sucked in by the promises that “all it takes is a single new client to pay for this.”

Sounds like the old Yellow Pages sales script, doesn’t it?

But the reality is this – you’re a grain of sand in the Sahara.  Someone finds you more by luck than anything else.

And even worse, there is more sand coming into the desert every minute.  More websites pop up, more blogs, more directories.  Content is everywhere, and it continues to pile up on top of your site.

You can paint yourself a different color, make a prettier website, and pay all the money you want.  Sorry to bear the bad news, but it isn’t going to save you.

Don’t have time to add content to your blog?

Don’t know what to write about?

Think it’s a waste of time?

Consider this:

• if you blog, you’re going to get 67% more leads from your online legal marketing efforts;
• having more pages of your website indexed leads to more traffic and, ultimately, more leads from your site to your firm;
• more leads means more clients;
• more clients means more revenue;
• more revenue means … well, a more rewarding life overall.

Most of the bankruptcy lawyers I know have flimsy websites with fewer than 20-30 pages of content.  Most of that content is stale, outdated and, quite frankly, not incredibly interesting.  Routine discussions of Chapter 7, Chapter 13, and the like – none of them saying anything in a way that particularly engages their prospective clients.

Just look at the search result at the top of this post – 2,880,000 results returned for a search of “bankruptcy lawyers.” That’s a lot of sand.

So I urge you to consider this – what steps will you take to formulate a content marketing strategy that multiplies those grains of sand and helps you get noticed?