Some search engine optimization (SEO) strategies will make legal marketing vendors a bundle of cash, but wastefully drain law firms’ marketing budgets.

You may have observed that maintaining multiple websites for your firm is no longer an effective practice in the SEO world. Adding several small microsites used to be a successful method of boosting your firm’s online presence. In the past, SEO was less complex, and a microsite could be easily built and optimized. Content could be duplicated across a lawyer’s main site and the related micro sites. The quantity of backlinks was valued more highly than the quality.

Today, the online marketing climate is drastically different.

There are several reasons why a multi-site approach no longer works to boost your law firm website’s rankings.  The advent of Google+ Local and Google Authorship, the increasing need for relevant legal content, the need for high-quality relevant incoming links and a greater emphasis on domain authority are some major reasons why this formerly standard SEO practice has become obsolete.

Google’s Matt Cutts first announced that microsites are a bad idea in May 2011. Rather than investing time into the development of microsites, experts suggest that website developers should create a comprehensive site attracting queries for multiple keywords, rather than building and maintaining separate websites that target one or two keyword phrases.

Unlike a storefront business that must open multiple locations to be conveniently located, you can build and maintain one mega-store – your website – that will reach all prospective clients. Picture major big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Target. Though they provide a one-stop shopping experience, they must build thousands of stores around the country to reach every market area. Amazon.com, by contrast, has the advantage of reaching all of its customers with one online storefront.

With a few exceptions, the affordable way to attract the most Web visitors is to build one, high-quality website. Some of our clients have developed comprehensive legal sites that are updated frequently, with a few hundred high-quality pages and numerous relevant incoming links. These inclusive websites rank relatively quickly for a new practice area, topical phrase or mass tort. Not only is maintaining one website the most effective approach, our clients have found that it is far less expensive to add features onto an existing site than it is to develop and optimize a new site.

For example, if one of our clients would like to refocus their Web properties on a new legal development, we create topical pages on their flagship website and drive traffic to those pages. Through this strategy, we are able to maintain the domain authority of their main website while providing a platform to speak to changing industry trends. Examples of this strategy include Hardison & Cochran’s North Carolina boating accident page and Joye Law Firm’s South Carolina workers’ compensation page.

At Consultwebs.com, we previously owned and managed more than 70 legal and commercial websites. Today, we have less than 10 websites, including our flagship Consultwebs.com site for lawyer marketing, our Law Web Marketing blog, our main Legal Directory and a few other premium directories.

Google owns approximately 70% of the Internet search market; even other search engines use ranking algorithms similar to Google. At the end of the day, websites that abide by Google’s guidelines will be served up as strong results for users.