Patience may be a virtue, but it is new cases that keep your law firm growing; waiting for someone to stumble onto an older website is not going to help your firm achieve those goals.A common mistake made by many law firms is pushing their website and online legal marketing strategies to the back of their priorities. By doing this, the law firm loses a lot of exposure and potential clients. With search engine optimization being progressive and taking a little time to achieve a quality ranking, it is important to move quickly before a competing law firm gets a head start.Everyday, people and businesses go online – not to the phone book – to look for a lawyer. In every major city and in every practice area, thousands of searches flock to Google and other searches engines to seek legal counsel.To show you how important it is to begin quickly, we ran a search count in several major metro areas in different corners of the United States. The number represents the number of searches Google received for that key phrase each month. It’s an approximation provided by Google.Miami divorce attorney – 1,600Seattle personal injury – 6,600Boston bankruptcy lawyer – 1,700Houston criminal defense – 12,000Los Angeles immigration lawyer – 3,600As you can see, the traffic is out there and if your website can’t be found or if it doesn’t look its best, your firm is missing out on new cases.As mentioned above, search engine optimization does not happen overnight so beginning a strong online marketing campaign soon is imperative to quickly seeing a return on investment with your marketing dollars.