Should Law Firms Do SEO In-House?
Date: May 12, 2022
After putting all of your time and money into creating a website, you want to make sure that people see it. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as launching a site and getting thousands of visitors. In fact, you can have the most beautiful, user-friendly website in the world, and it won’t mean anything without SEO.
A solid SEO strategy can make or break a website, so it’s not something you want to leave up to chance. While many organizations try to cut corners by doing their own web design and SEO, it costs them valuable resources without yielding the results they expect.
If you’ve been thinking about handling all of your SEO in-house, you might want to reconsider. Several factors go into taking on this initiative. We encourage you to keep reading to learn more about what you should consider before taking SEO in-house.
Your Team’s Bandwidth
Depending on the size of your law firm, you may or may not have the capacity to take on the workload of an SEO strategy without hiring more employees. Smaller firms are often overwhelmed by day-to-day legal tasks, so they typically don’t have the time to dedicate to SEO – or even marketing more generally – like they need to.
This is even more true if you are a solo practitioner. Think about how many hats you already have to wear. Do you want to add another one? Is it even possible with the long hours you currently work? You must ask yourself these questions if you are considering in-house SEO.
SEO isn’t something you want to handle randomly when you have a spare minute. It takes a lot of commitment to truly see any results. Your work will all be for nothing if you aren’t doing the necessary keyword research or regularly updating your content.
Your Team’s Expertise
Even if you do have the time and resources to tackle the job, you need to consider your team’s expertise. Do you have a web developer who also does SEO? Or are you strictly a team of legal professionals?
As a lawyer, it’s your job to be a legal expert, so no one expects you to know all of the ins and outs of SEO. However, many people underestimate the challenges of managing their own SEO strategy. They think they can just do a quick Google search and throw some keywords into a blog post every now and then. Unfortunately, this won’t cut it.
If you don’t have any employees with search engine optimization experience, you might want to consider outsourcing those tasks to a team of professionals. After all, you wouldn’t recommend that a SEO professional represent themselves in court without any legal background.
Your Budget
Just because you don’t have an SEO team on the payroll right now doesn’t mean you can’t add one to the roster. Of course, you can go through the hiring process and select a few capable individuals to take care of all the work in-house. This is an excellent option for larger law firms. It gives you more control over the process, and it ensures that you have a team that is wholly dedicated to your law firm rather than splitting their time across multiple clients.
However, this will come at a much larger price. While DIY is obviously the cheapest option, the cost of hiring an outside SEO team is a great middle ground. It allows you to get professional solutions without taking a huge chunk out of your budget. As we mentioned before, DIY might seem like the cheaper option up front, but it can end up being far more expensive than hiring an agency if you make too many mistakes.
Your Shortlist of Vendors and Other Vendors Involved
If you’re leaning more towards hiring an outside team, there are still plenty of factors to keep in mind. There are several different ways you can go about outsourcing your SEO. You have the option of hiring an agency that will offer full-service solutions. However, you might already have a team of developers or designers you like to work with. In this case, you may not need to hire a full-service agency to take care of your SEO strategy.
There are several ways you can go about hiring someone to handle your SEO strategy specifically. You can choose someone who will create it and pass it off to your team of preferred vendors to carry it out. You also have the option of hiring a freelancer to do your SEO keyword research if this is something your team doesn’t feel comfortable doing. It would help if you talked to the vendors you currently work with to see which option would be best for your law firm.
Your Current Standing from the Perspective of SERPS and Starting Point
We also recommend that you consider your website’s current standing. Where are you ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs)? Are you nowhere to be found on the first few pages? Are you already on the first page but want to move to number one? These are questions you’ll want to keep in mind.
If you are starting from scratch, you’re more than likely going to need full-service assistance to gain any traction. SEO is a long game, but working with a team of professionals can help to eliminate the trial and error process. An agency is still a great alternative to hiring an in-house team for law firms that have started their SEO strategy but need more assistance.
Find Out More About the Benefits of Outsourcing Your Law Firm’s SEO Strategy
Are you still unsure of whether or not you should hire an SEO agency to help your law firm? Do you want to see if outsourcing can fit into your budget? If you answered yes to either question, you have come to the right place. 9Sail offers professional SEO marketing and blog services to law firms like yours. Unlike other agencies, we specialize in working with lawyers, so you can trust that we understand your unique needs.
Best of all, we are happy to answer any questions you may have about hiring an agency. You can contact us to learn more about our services by calling, or you can request a free, no-strings-attached site audit. All you have to do is submit our simple online form, and we will reach out to you right away!
