Here is the biggest secret about SEO that I am going to share with you….
There is no secret. Despite what all the experts say, Google, Yahoo, MSN and every other search engine out there do not want a website to show better in their search results because of superior SEO. These search engines make their living by bringing back relevant websites to a particular query. If these results are skewed and not relevant, then the searcher will look elsewhere and not continue to use the search engine.
This creates a cat and mouse game between the SEO Experts (mostly Spammers) and the search engines. I would suggest you do not get caught up with all this.
Remember from my last post, above all, Content is King. If you are adding relevant content, have a Google Site Map (table of contents for Google), and are listed in a few good web directories then your lawyer website or blawg will do just fine. Stay away from trying to guess “keyword density” and other SEO methods. These strategies come and go. Trying to keep up with them will be frustrating, complicated, and in the end, not beneficial to your overall web traffic.
If your hobby is to SEO your law firm website on a frequent basis and the art of SEO interests you, then go ahead. Otherwise, put your head down, and refresh your relevant content. If you build it, they will come.
Attorney/Client lead and referral services claim that they take away the labor, analysis, confusion, and qualification of pay per click campaigns. A law firm pays the service and the service provides the law firm with leads it acquires through pay per click campaigns or organic capture.
In investigating a few of these services, including AttorneySync, LegalMatch, and LegalConnection, I found some good and not some good features.
All three did a good job of showing up on pay per click campaigns.
Legal Match and Legal Connection have a very detailed and long intake form which is good and bad. It is good that any referral or lead that gets to you has a lot of information and is more qualified than a typical web inquiry. It is bad that many potential clients will not have the patience to fill out the form.
The AttorneySync form was more intuitive and less lengthy than LegalMatch and LegalConnection. As you can imagine this is good and bad as I described before.
Once the form is filled, LegalMatch informs the user that an appropriate attorney will be in contact. AttorneySync actually shows the attorney that has meets the practice and location criteria. Legal Connection shows up to 3 possible attorneys that meet the criteria. Which one of these is better? I think all three have their merits.
Ok, so do I like the idea of this lead/referral service? I’ll give my generic answer of “it depends”. The upside is that these services take the grunt work out of SEO and Pay Per Click. These services have the ability to ratchet up their ad campaign to get your firm a certain amount of leads. These firms do all the research and heavy lifting for the right keywords. The downside is the uncertainty of the quality of the leads. No matter how long an intake form is, the lead may not be what the you are looking for. I especially hear this with Real Estate lawyers who complain they receive far too many Landlord/Tenant leads. DUI/DWI inquiries tend to be a lot more cut and dry. Either the potential lead was arrested for DUI or not.
So should you try one of these services? I would say giving one a shot would not be a bad idea as a compliment to your Law Firm website and Blawg (lawyer blog). You also need the time and the ability to respond quickly to one of these potential leads as these potential clients are in the market and want immediate feedback. I would also be wary to accept any promises of great leads and would be hesitant to commit to a long term contract.
Also, consult your state bar association on the ethics of these services. Some state rules are strict about referral services.
As you can guess from my previous posts, I believe a website for an attorney or law firm is one of the pillars of marketing your practice. A well constructed and crafted website can convey a professional/competent image and drive visitors and potential clients to your practice.
The two largest lawyer directories present attorney listings in a different manner. Lawyers.com, as a default, presents a typical “directory style” listing of a firm or attorney. In this listing, there is contact information, listing of lawyers, practice areas, law school information, etc. There is an option to “view website”.
Findlaw on the other hand, defaults the listing back to the attorney’s website. There are very few attorney listing that present the typical directory listings as described above.
There are pros and cons to both formats of listings. If I know a lawyer’s name, then the directory style listing is quicker and more efficient. If I don’t know a specific attorney, then I may want to investigate their website. Findlaw does not give the directory listing style whereas Lawyers.com gives you both options. For this reason, I have to give the nod to Lawyers.com for more consumer choice.
As every other industry across the country and globally, the practice of law is affected by the severe downturn in the economy. There are less real estate transactions, mortgages, deed and title work, real estate settlements, estate planning, and general business and consumer transactions.
1. Take a fresh look at your firm’s website content. Is it relevant for today’s economic reality? Is the tone of the content in alignment with your target audience’s mood? For instance an estate planning attorney may want to add some content which says something like “We understand the current economic reality, but now is the absolute best time to reavaluate your estate planning strategy” This will have some resonance with your potential client that A. you recognize and sympathize with his or her current mood and B. Give them a reason to come see you for a consultation when your potential client may not have otherwise.
2. Realize that all consumers including your potential clients are hesitant to make big decisions and are doing even more online research. These potential clients want information to help them in their decision making process. This means your site will need more legal related information to allow your potential client to “dip their toe in the water” and see if you are an expert in there desired issue. Customers are going to go online to find information, are they coming to your website or someone elses?
3. Create a lawyer blog giving your opinions or current economic news on a regular basis. The good news is that blogs do not have to be as formal as a typical law firm website. You do have to be consistent in writing a post on a regular basis.
4. Scour the internet for free lawyer directories and submit your website.
5. Submit you law articles to legal related article websites.
6. Look for legal question and answer websites and answer questions that are in your area of practice. You will establish yourself as an expert, allow you to get a potential client, and create a weblink back to your website.
I wrote about a site called AskingLaw several months ago. The site is a law Q&A website that is taking off in the right direction. In fact they are generating between 6K-10K unique visitors a month (they supplied me with their traffic reports). Great for a site that has been around for less than a year. I have their RSS feed on my site.
The site caters to consumers looking for answers to their legal related questions, very similar to this site, however we don’t have the ability of allowing our viewers to ask questions. The reason for my post isn’t so much for the reader but for the attorney.
We write marketing pieces every now and then on this site. Something that we’ve not mentioned is your ability to market your firm on Q&A sites. The great thing about AskingLaw is you don’t have to have a log-in to ask or answer questions. They even allow the person answering questions the ability to link to their site and put their full contact information on their answers (great for exposure and picking up new clients).
There is no doubt in my mind if I were a practicing attorney ,I certainly would be participating on this site to market my own practice. The other nice feature that they offer is the ability to upload their RSS feeds. I like RSS feeds for several reasons. As an attorney you could upload one of these feeds to your site or even bookmark it on your browser. For instance, if I’m a practicing personal injury lawyer I may want to bookmark their personal injury RSS feed. Check it once a day, answer a few questions and get some nice link exchange which ultimately will lead to new clients.
There are other services on the internet very similar such as lawguru and findlaw. I think it would be advantageous to look at all three services, however, a free service without having to sign-in is ideal.
If anyone else has any other cool legal sites, please feel free to share.
Lawyers be patient! That is my advice to those lawyers that have invested time and money into their website marketing plan. I once again reiterate that internet marketing doesn’t happen over night although with the right SEO development you could potentially get results within several months.
The biggest part of promoting your website online is to continue to update your site with new content. You will want to refer to previous posts I’ve created for this site. Too many lawyers get discouraged because they don’t see results right away. They invest money into directories only too see their investment fall to the waste side. I also see folks in the SEO world developing 3-4 sites for a particular business and there is no way they can keep up with all four sites without help. My suggestion would be to concentrate on 1-2 sites.
A good idea would be to create your attorney website and attach a blog to the site. There are several tricks I’ve given throughout these articles and I HIGHLY suggest you read through my articles before you begin your website marketing campaign.
When someone is using the internet they are first and foremost searching for legal information about their problem. In order to capture those people you need to generate rich content. This content if written correctly can do 2 things. It will first be recognized by the search engines and second it will capture your audience. I’ve come across high ranking sites that were poorly written however the SEO was written almost to perfection. While the site is showing up on the first page of google I’m pretty sure the prospect to client ratio was poor.
You can create good content for your website without having to abandon your readers. If you use good title tages, keywords density and meta tags along with a well written page you will capture the SERPS and generate clients to your practice.
In closing, be patient. Like a favorite movie of mine, “If you build it he will come” If you continue to add good content to your website, clients will come!
We have talked about lawyer marketing for websites but how about blogs? I would like to give each lawyer that knows nothing about search engine marketing a quick overview. Search engine marketing is your ability to get exposure on the search engines. This means building a site with relevant content and having your pages show up on the first page of the major search engines.
While I recommend each lawyer to have a website its becoming more obvious that google is on board with the blogs. A blog is a great way to create exposure on the internet and the best part about it, its very easy to learn. There are several different blogging software programs out there but WordPress is by far the best. They’ve got the whole search engine marketing game down and best of all, they’ve got a huge community backing them. You can download their software for free by clicking here wordpress.org.
Lawyer blogs are becoming common ground in the legal industry because search engines like google love fresh content. If your blogging software is search engine friendly like wordpress, you can certainly capture those keyword search terms. You can blog like you are writing content. Consider reverting back to past posts on this blog.
There are many lawyers who are taking advantage of blogging and those lawyers are generating the majority of their business via the internet. Over the last year, I’ve consulted over a dozen of lawyers and each one has taking the leap into becoming bloggers. In fact, most of them are generating 2-3 times more unique visitors to their blog compared to their website. The majority of all their visitors are coming from google with a select few coming from yahoo and msn. Each one of these lawyers are hosting the wordpress software.
I’ve also been consulting with a group that has a very interesting blog. They use the blog to interact with people searching for legal information, very much like this site. They came to me about 8 months ago searching for ideas on how to help kick-start their website. We looked at several different options and decided to put their site on a blog. They are now generating over 1,200 unique visitors a day to their site. The numbers are staggering considering just 8 months ago they were getting about 600 unique visitors to their site per month. I directly contribute this to fresh content and the blogging software.
If you are a lawyer and you’ve noticed that your website isn’t generating as much traffic as usual, it could be a direct result of a competitor blogging about your key search terms.
I will talk a little more in-depth at a later time. I’ve got work to do and so do you. Get busy and start blogging!