I just got off the phone with a lawyer asking me questions about search engine optimization for a family law practice. She knew just enough to be dangerous. “I need my website optimized,” she said. “I want it to be at the top of the page on Google.”

She asked me which search engine optimization firm I’d suggest. We looked at her site, and I suggested that she wait a bit before hiring someone to help her.

As I went through her site, I found the usual info—her bio, a bit of “about us” material about her firm, and a few pages of fluff about family law. There really wasn’t much of anything on the site that made it interesting. There wasn’t anything there that would cause someone to hang around the site, come back, and mention it to a friend. It was basically a brochure stuck up on the web.

If your website is about the same as hers, then you’d better do SOMETHING if you care about traffic. I’m sad to say that few visitors are interested in a site about a lawyer. They are, however, very interested in a site about their problem. The more you can do to make the site about the client’s problem, the more traffic you’re going to get. That traffic is going to come with or without search engine optimization.

Traffic will find you if your site answers the questions being asked by people searching for answers on the web.

I’m not disparaging search engine optimizers. Some of them do a great job of tweaking content on your site. If, however, you’re asking them to bring traffic to a site that has no reason for being, then you’re asking them to do something illogical and nonsensical. There’s little reason to draw visitors to your site when they’re going to leave within seconds of their arrival.

I recently worked with a law firm spending $6,000 per month on search engine optimization. The site has little content of note. The traffic it’s getting from gaming the search engines by optimizing pages and getting links is minimal. The firm isn’t generating many new clients as a result of its efforts.

What if the firm spent $6,000 generating content? What if the lawyers created new articles, videos, podcasts, and answers to the questions prospective clients are asking? What if they did research on emerging issues and published it on the site? What if they brought people together on the site to share common concerns and issues? Would they get better results (more clients) than if they kept spending it on search engine optimization?

They sure would. Guaranteed.

Content matters. It’s what we’re all seeking when we travel around the web. We set out to find something in particular. Your job as a content provider is to give the visitors what they think they need.

It’s so easy to get caught up in building a site about yourself. It’s fun to see your name up in lights next to your picture. It feels good.

It doesn’t, however, feel so good when you have to write the checks for keeping the site alive.

Focus on giving people a reason to visit your site. Make it about them. Give them what they need, and they’ll visit. Once you’ve developed the content, then you can worry about the search engines. For most of us, we’ve got a bunch of work to do before we need to optimize anything.