A lot of the clients want to get into the Maps, which not sure if you know what the Maps are, but in Google when you search for something like “Baltimore personal injury attorney” or “Baltimore estate planning lawyer”. Typically what’s going to happen is, the searcher is going to see three listings at the top of search results that are below the ads but above the organic listings. And there’s going to be a map associated with these and it’s got the address, the phone number, a link to the website, driving directions, all that kind of stuff. There’s only three listings so it’s really important that you optimize your website. Really well to appear in these listings because a lot of times if you’re in these three listings and you have the most reviews, you are probably going to get the phone calls.
So one of the things that you need to think about in terms of how to appear in these. Google is typically looking for proximity to the searcher So what that means is that if you’re physically located near the searcher. Google is going to show a preference to you. The other thing you can do to make sure that you’re more relevant to more searchers, is to convince. Google that you’re geographically relevant to the search So for example, if someone searches “Baltimore personal injury attorney” or “Baltimore DUI lawyer”, you want to make sure that Google sees your website as being highly relevant to Baltimore. Now the way that we found to this is by getting links from other organizations and businesses in Baltimore to link to the website.
So there’s a couple ways you can do this. First thing you can do is if you know any local businesses that you can partner up with, maybe do a guest post, or maybe you could just toss them a couple bucks for a link to the website But a lot of times, the clients don’t necessarily want to do that. So what we actually do is we find youth sports organizations. So we’ll search “Baltimore youth soccer”, “Baltimore youth hockey”, “Baltimore youth cheerleading” baseball, basketball, football, T-ball, dance, anything like that.
And we email the organizations and we offer to make a donation to their organization anywhere in the realm of $150-$300, just kind of depending on how generous you’re feeling. But in the email we say, “Listen, we’d like to make a donation in exchange for a link from your website”. We typically email anywhere from fifty to a hundred organizations per client and we typically get about a 10 to 20% return. So you know, we end up with 10 or 20 links that are, are highly relevant to our client’s website. Now the nice part is, is that typically we make a one-year deal, we say “We’ll give you $250 for one year”.
But a lot of these organizations are not extremely organized. So what ends up happening is after that year, the link usually stays up, so what ends up happening is you end up getting a link for you know, three or four years for what you agreed to pay for one year. Now, if you want to go back and make another donation that’s totally up to you If you want to just kind of let it roll and see how long one link can get you for your initial donation, that’s up to you as well. But you know getting in the maps is extremely important and this is a really good way to get a heads up on your competition.
It doesn’t take any technical ability whatsoever. All it takes is a few emails and some research that can be done in a few hours. Hope this helps.