It’s time for your law firm to abandon PDFs. Why? Because they are killing your Google rankings and shutting off a potentially large source of website traffic (and new business).

Law Firms Love PDFs

Many law firm websites are packed with PDFs. In fact, some law firms post ALL of their “thought leadership” content (like articles, case studies, newsletters) in PDF format. These are often the meatiest content on their websites. Unfortunately, much of the PDF content out there is practically invisible to Google and other search engines.

The good news is that converting PDFs into HTML pages solves this problem. While this process can be time consuming, the potential payoff is huge, because you will be opening your website to an entirely new channel of high-quality website traffic.

How is this? Because of Long Tail SEO.

What is Long Tail SEO?

Long Tail SEO is all about garnering Google traffic from a large number of seemingly obscure and infrequently searched terms related to your business. For example, Long Tail SEO yields traffic when people Google highly specific terms like:

* “pros and cons of living trusts for unmarried people”, or

* “impact of 2010 financial reform act on credit unions”

Facilitating Long Tail

The best way to enable Long Tail SEO is by adding lots of high-quality content to your website (such as articles, blog posts and case studies) in HTML format. All of this content acts as bait for Google. However, this bait doesn’t work well in PDF.

Here’s the Best Part

What I like most about Long Tail SEO is that it doesn’t require an SEO consultant. The content you add to your website is inherently optimized for these long tail searches, as long as it’s reasonably long and rich in detail.

While you will also want to make some basic code tweaks to your website so that your newly added text content is more Google-friendly, these SEO techniques are far from rocket science and can be implemented by any decent web programmer. However, the first step