What Does It Take To Be #1?

As much as we advise legal professionals not to obsess over their “google rankings”, it still remains one of the most frequent questions that we get. So, what does it take to be #1? To a large extent, the answer depends on your competition.

You see, each search query varies in terms of competition. For example, with very little work, and assuming you don’t share a name with a celebrity, ranking number one for your own name can be achieved quite simply. In fact, you may only need to take out a domain that matches your name and optimize your home page with your name. For example, if your name is John Doe, you might register the domain johndoe.com and include “John Doe” in your title tag, header tags, and in the text on the page. Of course, if your name is John Doe, it will be much more difficult to rank for your name as you will be competing with wikipedia for the #1 spot in google.

As search phrases become more competitive, the basic techniques, while still a good foundation, will not propel you to the first page. And on the highly competitive end of the spectrum, will require substantial commitments in time and probably significant monetary investment. However, the most important thing you can do, that is in your direct control, is to publish interesting and useful content.

The words you use on your website and blog posts are simply the most important part of your online presence. If your website and blogs are filled with regurgitated news stories, advertisements about the firm, or other generally worthless content, it will be much more difficult to attain that coveted #1 ranking for more competitive keywords. So why do so many law firms and other businesses engage in this strategy?

Without going into a detailed discussion of domain authority, it’s worth noting that searches use a lot of different search phrases to find things online. In fact, Google has stated that as many as 25% of searches in a given time period have never been searched for before. So, by posting lower quality “spammy” content on their websites, these law firms that have even some domain authority are able to pick up “long tail” traffic to their sites. However, in light of Google’s most recent update, this method for gaining visibility in search engines is supposed to be rendered less-effective if not completely useless. Plus, as you may guess, posting this type of content does nothing to improve the number of links to your site, which is one of the most important parts to getting to number one for more competitive keywords.

This is why spending a great deal of time focusing on the quality of the content on your website and in your blog posts is so important. By creating content that is linkable and which encourages visitors to further publicize it, you will attract much more link-attention and increase your visibility in search engines.

Of course, there are many other ways to build links to your website besides writing great content and getting in front of people that are ready, willing, and able to link to it. But if you’re looking for just one thing that you can do, my vote would be to spend time thinking about your writing and distributing it in places where other people interested in your subject-matter will be looking online.