Marketing your law firm online might seem like a simple endeavor: You make a website, then you put stuff into it and reap the rewards as it launches to the top of the results.
Unfortunately, search engines are constantly honing their practices. This makes it difficult to build the right website and fill it with the right content and know that it’ll still be the right strategy a few months from now. Predicting how search engines will change in the near future requires a nuanced understanding of how search engines work, and forces you to keep your ear to the ground to see how they are evolving.
Luckily, understanding how search engines work isn’t so difficult if you see what they’re all about: Satisfying their users.
Search Engines Are a Business
It’s an often overlooked fact: Google, Bing, and other search engines are businesses, operating in our world for the sole purpose of making a profit. To make a profit, they offer a unique and important service – they index the internet. This service draws people in. Search engines then pummel those people with advertisements. In fact, ads make up 96% of Google’s profits, through its AdWords and AdSense programs.
It’s a big business, but the advertising money relies on a search engine’s ability to draw people to their site. Search engines are in a constant arms race with each other to satisfy internet users with the results they get on their site.
Two Touchstones: Relevance and Importance
When you get on a search engine like Google and put in a search query, the two key factors you’re looking for in the results are relevance and importance. If you’re searching for “world’s best ketchup,” but the results are all jokes about ketchup, you’ll probably be left unsatisfied. The results just aren’t relevant to what you want.
Using this example, let’s also imagine that there’s one website that expertly explores all of the ketchup varieties in the world, analyzes them, and objectively tells you which one is the best. Clearly, that’s the most important site for the query, “world’s best ketchup.” If that site isn’t at or very close to the top of the results listing, though, you’ll probably be left unsatisfied with the other results that you get.
If you’re left unsatisfied enough with the results you get using one search engine, you’ll start trying another one, moving your internet traffic from the first to the second, which increases the ad revenue of your new search engine of choice.
Predicting Search Engine Practices
When you see that search engines are all about providing results that are relevant and important, it becomes far easier to predict how they’ll adapt their techniques to specific obstacles and over the long term. It allows professional search engine marketers like those at Myers Freelance to stay ahead of the curve by writing your web content in ways that will not suddenly become a liability when search engines change. Contact us online to get started on your site.