I have a very successful law firm that has lost its natural rankings. Looking for the best SEO consultant available to bring my rankings back. I really the need the best person out there and cost is not an issue.

[Mazeman]

Looking For the BEST SEO Consultant

[MarieHaynes]

Hi David,

I've reviewed a lot of legal sites lately.  So many of them have been affected by Google's Penguin algorithm because of unnatural link building.  If you've had links built in the past then you may need to do a thorough link audit in order to clean things up before you can move on. For some sites there can be Panda issues as well that need to be cleared up in order for the site to see improvement.

What is difficult though is the "moving on" portion.  When Google ranks law firms for a particular city, how do they determine whether you rank at the top or not?  You can only go so far by cleaning up links.  You can go a little farther by improving your site from an on page perspective so that it performs well for both crawlers and for users.  But then what do you do?

The next component that Google uses in order to determine whether you should rank better than your competitors is links.  In the past, you could create your own links in a myriad of directories, article sites, bookmarking sites, etc.  But that's the type of thing that gets sites penalized.  Google only wants to count links that are truly valid votes for a site.  But I would imagine that there are not a lot of people who want to write glowing reviews of their attorney and link to them.  Still, there are some valid ways to get links to legal sites:

-There are some directories that are acceptable and probably could send you clients as well.

-You can get links from valid industry partners.

-You can sometimes get good links by finding unlinked mentions of your firm and getting them to link to you.

-The BEST way to get links is to produce content that people would find useful and then promote that content so that people will link to it.  But, this is hard to do.  There are companies that can do this, but you have to be picky when choosing one.  And, if you find one that can do this well, it will be expensive.

When it comes to identifying whether you have a Penguin or Panda problem or another type of algorithmic issue that is holding you back, and fixing those issues, I can help you with this (although I do have a bit of a waiting list.)  In regards to promoting your site once the algo issues are fixed up, probably the best option is to go through the list of recommended companies here (http://moz.com/community/recommended) and asking them the following questions:

-Tell me how you would get links to my site? - I would want to hear specific answers and not marketing speak like, "We'll leverage our blah blah blah and promote blah blah blah with our proprietary method."

-Do you have references?  - Don't let them hide behind NDA's.  If they have successfully helped clients in the past with their rankings then they will have plenty of businesses who are happy to give them a reference.

Hope that helps!

Marie

[Travis_Bailey]

Hi David,

This isn't really the forum for hiring consultants. As stated, you can go with the recommended list from Moz. I would much rather discuss some of the issues in the forum, out in the open. It's more fun that way.

Just from looking at a couple of the 19 or so domain names registered throughout the years, the situation looks like a bit of a hot mess. Best of luck.

[Ron_McCabe]

Dean, I sen you a private message. I would want to know more about your challenges as well as what has already been done to try and get you search results. I would also want to know more about your goals as well as what your conversion rate is. If I can help I will let you know. If I cannot I will try to refer you to someone who can. All the best! Ron

[Ray-pp]

Moz provides a list of recommended agencies to work with.

http://moz.com/community/recommended

The list isn't updated often, so if you've already considered those and need more direction I can be emailed through Moz's PM system and/or contacted through the website in my profile.