BIG LAW FIRMS IGNORE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Ive noticed many bigger or well known law firms that just totally ignore search engine optimization. I saw an article today at Law.com about the Houston-based Lanier Law Firm, famous for winning a $253 million Vioxx-related jury verdict against pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. in August 2005.
The article talks about how the firm has launched a new Web site and hopes the site is going to generate new business and that it will be used as a marketing tool. Yet I don’t see any kind of search engine optimization on the site. Some comments from the article….
The firm’s management hopes the much larger site will take advantage of firm founder W. Mark Lanier’s notoriety and bring in business.
"The real purpose of the redesigned site, with the name recognition that Mark has, and the new office in New York, was to have a site that spoke more clearly to visitors — from media to the community to clients," said Kevin Roberts, the firm’s executive director, who coordinated the project. "But it’s still a marketing tool. Hopefully, new business will come in."
But will the site be successful as a marketing tool?
Not as successful as it could be! As of right now the site doesn’t have any meta tags or more importantly keyword rich unique titles on each page of the site. So the bottom line is that its not going to get as much traffic from the search engines as it could be getting if the site was optimized for keywords related to the firms practice. They are not alone, It seems like most bigger firms ignore any kind of search engine optimization.
I’ve seen much worse from an SEO perspective. At least he has page titles that are mildly descriptive of the on-page content, although I doubt they’ve done any KW analysis based on what I see here. He does have a decent 5 Page Rank for whatever that’s worth and a good number of incoming links. Most of them are from various FindLaw subdomains so I suspect they are responsible for developing his site. I’m sure they charged him a pretty penny for it.