If your law firm is not using Squidoo as part of your web site marketing strategy, then you are missing out on a real opportunity to add some muscle to your campaign. In Squidoo, you create “lenses,” which are dynamic web pages devoted to a single topic. Users are encouraged to create multiple lenses on many different subjects, which makes it an excellent tool for marketing a law firm web site.
Following are some tips for making the most of your Squidoo lenses. As you become familiar with the Squidoo system and gain experience dealing with lenses, you will come up with your own strategies to compliment those listed here.
1. Don’t guess about what keywords for which to promote your firm. Rather, use keyword research to make that determination. Use the keyword tool of your choice (I recommend Google’s external tool) to pick strong keywords related to your practice.
For example, if your keyword tool indicates that a good keyword for your firm is “Jacksonville car accident lawyer” (assuming your firm is based in Jacksonville), then you could build a Squidoo lens called “Jacksonville-car-accident-lawyer.squidoo.com,” which would likely rank very well for that keyword.
2. Make sure your lenses are attractive and high quality. Lenses in their default state are junky and not useful. Each one of your lenses needs to be well put-together and aesthetically pleasing. Using Squidoo modules, it is easy to set up a page that looks good and updates itself.
3. Add keyword tags to your lenses. Tagging your lenses with keywords makes it more likely that your lenses will show up in Squidoo searches and in search engine results. There is also a strong SEO-related reason for this. Basically, PageRank can be passed from a Squidoo tags page to your lenses and then onto your main site.
4. Use keywords in links from your Squidoo pages to your main site. This is the most basic SEO use of your Squidoo lenses. If you build a good lens, it only makes sense to place a prominent keyword link on the page that links to your site for the SEO boost (via the passing of PageRank in Google, as mentioned above).
5. Create a series of Squidoo lenses related to your firm’s practice areas that link to each other. For every keyword that your research shows is being used to search for your practice, create a Squidoo lens for it. Placing links in your Squidoo lenses to your other lenses makes it easier for both people and search engines to find them.
6. Give your lenses some visibility by submitting them to social bookmarking web sites and other social media sites. If you’re lucky, some people will like your lenses enough to bookmark them themselves, which can have a snowball effect. Even if no one else bookmarks your lenses, they will get a little exposure and they will get some free inbound links. Taking it a step further, you could also build pages on other social networking sites such as HubPages and extend your campaign beyond the walls of Squidoo.
7. Communicate with other Squidoo lens owners. Contact people who have built Squidoo lenses on a topic relevant to your own lenses and offer to swap links. Squidoo encourages users to link to one another, and this can also improve your visibility within the Squidoo system.
Follow these tips and you will be on your way to leveraging Squidoo to give some power to your law firm’s search engine marketing campaign. Is this a lot of work? Yes. But search engine marketing isn’t easy, especially in competitive markets. So you can either get left behind, do the work, or hire a company to do the work for you.
to learn more about developing a powerful law firm internet marketing strategy that will leave your competitors in the dust, check out the law firm marketing service of work media, llc, at www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net.