Law Firm Websites: Important Content Marketing Tips to Appeal to Readers

Thursday, May 16, 2013

For law firm websites, competition can be frustrating.  Your competitors might already have a leg up on you in terms of content marketing, where people looking for advice could read an informative post – and then pick up the phone.

Whether or not this is the case, the opportunity is there.  You can obtain more business through SEO, social media, and other outlets.  And it all starts with content marketing.

In a recent look at content marketing tips from Sarah Schager, her team offers some insightful tips that can help your law firm take advantage of content marketing:

• Consistency: Aim to produce content that is relevant and valuable.  This creates loyalty, a brand voice, and puts you in a position as an expert. 

• Use Media that is Shareable: Infographics and videos are perfect for sharing via social media.  This tip from Erin Pritchard relates the value of media – where it can merge with the content to provide value.

• It Should be Data-Driven: What are your prospective clients searching for?  What location(s) are relevant to searchers?  This data can help your law firm find the appropriate key words.

• Use a Content Calendar: Find a posting schedule that works for your law firm.  This type of tool can help you keep everything ordered and make changes as needed, such as not having similar posts too close together.

These and other presented tips can easily carry over to a law firm blog, as seen in the previous selection.  With these strategies, your firm can reach prospective clients that are searching for the right content – or ultimately, the right legal counsel.

Contact us to learn more about SEO, social media, and online marketing techniques that can get your law firm to the top!

Lawyers Adopting Social Media Strategies

Thursday, May 02, 2013

Legal marketing has changed over the years. With the rise of social media, law firms now seek the attention of clients via tweets, videos, blogposts, and other online content. 

As an attorney, you may already have a Facebook or Twitter account. Perhaps you use them to connect with friends and family. However, social media offers more. 

By building social networks, you can attract new clients, keep your knowledge up to date, and connect with peers. Leading lawyers use social media to remain relevant as well as to market to other people who chose to remain relevant. 

Social media marketing offers advantages such as: 

Cost. According to a 2009 Bloomberg post, corporate lawyers’ use of social networking is growing. Some are even using LinkedIn to connect with other professionals around the world. And all it cost them is the time it takes to set up a free profile and start networking. 

Access. Online marketing means reaching a wider audience with your message – right now. No more waiting for ad development, printing, and publication. You can build a following with your blog, discuss helpful topics with colleagues via LinkedIn, pinpoint where ideal clients hang out online, and monitor your brand and reputation through feedback and review sites. 

Networking. This is what social media is all about. Building online relationships with potential clients, peers and colleagues, and people of influence allows you to promote yourself and your practice. In so doing, you can share your legal expertise and gain credibility. Recognition in your field may lead to other opportunities such as speaking engagements, consulting requests, and more. 

And if all this isn’t enough, there are specialty social media websites designed just for lawyers, such as LegalOnRamp.com. 

Putting social media to good use is a matter of taking the time and making the effort. For some good tips on how to get started, check out this 2010 Mashable post, “How Lawyers Are Using Social Media for Real Results.” 

For more information on social media, social networking, website design, and other internet marketing services for lawyers, contact us. We’re here to help. 

Kings of the Obvious: Lexis Nexis Study Reports Key Features Needed on All Legal Sites

Thursday, April 25, 2013

A law firm's website is perhaps it's most crucial advertisement, and a new study by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell identifies the specific features that are most likely to convert visits to inquiries.

LexisNexis commissioned uLab | Participatory Design Associates to conduct the "2013 Law Firm Website Conversion Study" which evaluated consumers' opinions about law firm websites. Study participants were asked to recall a time when they needed to hire an attorney. Then, they reviewed several law firm websites and talked about their initial reactions and feelings about each one. Researchers compiled their comments as part of the study. 

The results aren't all that surprising.

Here's what study participants liked:

• Sites that are easy to navigate

• Well-crafted, informative attorney profiles

• Results from cases

• Free case evaluations

• Seamlessly integrated social media engagement opportunities

• Videos that are easy to view and useful

• Sites where the location of the firm is clearly identifiable

• Educational resources

• Descriptions of competitive differentiators

Participants didn't like sites that seemed overly commercial, included low-quality, poorly chosen photographs, had weak design schemes and hard-to-use contact forms. Law firm websites without case results were also rated negatively.

So why is this information important as you think about your law firm's website? 

Sites that include the features consumers prefer are more likely to convert a exploratory visit to an email or phone call. In other words, if a potential clients responds favorably to your firm's website, he or she is more likely to seek additional information about your services. 

Let us help you develop a well-designed website that elicits a response from your potential clients. Contact us today to learn more about our services for law firms.

Why An Attorney Should Use Facebook and Google +

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Working with attorneys over the past 7 years has taught me something.  Not very many want to try anything new until it's been proven...and then it's too late.  When I first started working with law firms a simple website with decent title and meta tags would provide an unbelievable ROI.  Attorneys were tentative about building websites.  Some didn't think they needed it because they got all of their clients from referrals.  Others didn't trust the internet and some "old school" attorneys didn't feel comfortable "advertising" online.  By the way, talk to Blockbuster about waiting too long to jump on the internet train.  Oh wait, they were bankrupted by companies like Netflix.

Now here we are, 7 years later and almost every law firm has a website.  The number of potential clients hasn't increased exponentially but the number of attorneys online has.  So, how do you differentiate yourself?  How do you stay one step ahead of your competitors?  The answer...be an early adopter.  You don't need to jump on every band wagon but when Facebook has almost a billion users and Google puts out a new product, you should check it out.

Will you get any clients from Facebook?  Probably not.  At least not this year but you never know what Facebook will turn into.  They are already working with Bing to include Facebook entries into their results page.  The age old adage "you get out of it what you put in" really applies here.  Setting up a Facebook page and letting it sit there does you no good.  This isn't traditional marketing.  You're not buying an ad in the YellowPages.  That page should be used to push out information about your firm or showcase your knowledge in your field.  I say this to all of my clients, you need to give in order to receive when it comes to the internet (take this blog for example).

Google + will probably have a better impact in the near future on your online marketing.  It allows you to customize your page and use the status section as an external blog.  You can also tie your Google local account into your + page.  Make sure to do your research before setting up your page.  You want to maximize the effort you spend on your social media so make sure you're doing it correctly.  Look at other accounts that perform well and research what they are doing.

Of course, you can always wait until these new resources reach maturity but by then it will be too late.

What Does Google Penguin Mean to Your Law Firm

Monday, July 23, 2012

Google Penguin is an algorithm update that was initiated back in April.  The main focus of the update was to discredit "bad" links to sites.  So, if you were participating in building links to your site (yourself or through your SEO company) you may have been negatively affected.  Some sites lost major ranking and big offenders may have been blacklisted. 

The update was suppose to strip credit for bad links but not affect good sites that may have had some of those same links.  The theory behind that is to eliminate people from buying these worthless links and pointing them at their competitors sites.  There is still some debate on whether sites can be negatively damaged by these bad links or if they are just no longer getting credit for them.

Google Penguin has prompted some attorneys to look into more credible SEO companies for their optimization.  Just like a day trader that gets bit by a couple bad stock purchases, an event like this can expose that fact that you may be better off practicing law than optimizing your own website.

Have You Been Penalized By Google?

Monday, July 23, 2012

Matt Cutts released this blog today:

"If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.

If we've taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice a drop in search traffic, which you can see in the “Search queries” feature Webmaster Tools for example. As always, if you believe you have been affected by a manual spam action and your site no longer violates the Webmaster Guidelines, go ahead and file a reconsideration request. It’ll take some time for us to process the request, but you will receive a followup message confirming when we’ve processed it.

Update: Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on this change. An engineer worked over the weekend based on the suggestions here, and starting on Sunday we made two changes so you can tell the "individual links aren't trusted" messages from the "our opinion of your entire site is affected" messages.

First off, we changed the messages themselves that we'll send out to make it clear that for a specific incident "we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole." So anyone that gets a message going forward can tell what type of action has occurred.

The second change is that these messages won't show the yellow caution sign in our webmaster console at http://google.com/webmasters/ like our other webspam notifications. This reflects the fact that these actions are much more targeted and don't always require action by the site owner.

Thanks again for the feedback, and we'll continue to work on ways to provide more useful and actionable information for site owners."

If this post by Mr. Cutts makes sense to you then you are doing more SEO work than legal work.  This post is meant for those who were "damaged" by Google Penguin.  Google Penguin was released to strip away the benefit that some law firms were getting from buying links.  This has been a common practice for quite some time but Google finally decided to put its foot down.  Law firms who may have gotten away with this practice for months or even years are now paying the price.  

If you are an attorney reading this, the best piece of advice I can give you is to not try to trick the system but to work within it.  That means, provide information on your website (and other online profiles) that will be helpful to the legal community in general.  You can fool some people some of the times but you can't fool Google for very long.

Who do you trust more? An algorithm, or your “Friends”?

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Let me couch this blog by saying we're not sure this is how Facebook is going to do their search but it may be close.

Facebook is banking on the idea that people will accept the advice of their friends over that of a computer. It is their goal to turn Facebook’s 500+ million users into an internal referral source for movies, restaurants and yes…attorneys.

When you do a search on Google, you are letting an algorithm suggest information that is relevant to your query. Facebook is working on a search engine that will deliver results that your “friends” “Like”.

Business pages on Facebook have a “Like” button. Once someone clicks the “Like” button all of their “friends” in their network will be notified that they like a particular restaurant, charity or attorney. So, if one person has 200 “friends” all 200 people will be aware of your law firm. That means, every time you receive a “Like” hundreds of people will now be aware of your business. Even better, eventually, when someone searches the Facebook network for an attorney, your law firm will show up in the results if any of their “friends” is connected to you.

At Omnipresent SEO, we believe social media is going to be a big part of the future for law firms. Think 10 years back and how many law firms had websites. Nowadays, if you don’t have one people look at you strange. The same is going to happen with social media resources like Facebook.

Below are two great articles that give more insight into how big and revolutionary this type of search will be.

Facebook Patent on "Curated Search"

Facebook Goes After Google's Market

Yet Another Move by Google to Enhance Social Media's Role in Search

Friday, February 18, 2011

As we have written about before, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is creeping into the world of search.  It makes perfect sense, really.  A big part of Google's traditional algorithm is evaluating how many links come into a web site, and who those links are from.  Think of it as peer review.  

But in that scenario, the "peers" are other web sites, not people you know.  Ah, but the people I know are all on my social networks.  What if Google and the other search engines could know who my friends are and then cross reference what they like when giving me answers to my queries?

That is precisely what they are doing with the announcement of Social Search (see Google's blog post here). 

This isn't an entirely new product.  Previously, Google announced the incorporation of similar things in the SERPS, but this takes it to a new level. 

Conspicuously missing from Google's Social Search, however, is Facebook.   The two companies have not been playing nice lately (Facebook has been raiding Google's best employees, and recently Google stopped allowing Facebook to access its users Gmail accounts, etc), and I assume that is a factor in all of this.  But for Social Search to really have an impact, it is going to need to include Facebook eventually, and I am sure that it will.  (The other scenario, which is certainly possible, is that Facebook will finally add a SEARCH feature that only shows results from your connections). 

The bottom line is this:  search is changing, and it is obvious that it is moving towards a much more customizable and socially based system.  If your business isn't yet listed on the Social Sites, soon you might find yourself no longer listed on most people's search results either. 

MORE INFORMATION:

Why A Business Should Be On Facebook


A Video From Google About Their Social Search Update:

Great Article in the New York Times "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search"

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Yesterday's New York Times had a great article about the SEO tactics employed by JC Penney's SEO Company that initially vaulted the JC Penney web site to the top of the Google rankings, but that eventually were then flagged by Google as being in violation of their rules. 

This brings to mind something we always talk about with our clients:  short term versus long term gain. 
As the article demonstrates, using some of these "black hat" SEO tactics can certainly work.  JC Penney was showing up #1 in the Search Results for searches of "Samsonite", "skinny jeans," "area rug," and hundreds, if not thousands, more keywords.  If you had asked JC Penney a few weeks ago if the strategy was paying off, I'm sure they would have called it an unqualified success.  And why not?  As the NYT article mentions, a JC Penny spokesperson was crowing about the company's December sales, saying “Internet sales through jcp.com posted strong growth in December, with significant increases in traffic and orders for the key holiday shopping periods of the week after Thanksgiving and the week before Christmas.”

But now the celebration is over.   Google is on to JC Penney, and suddenly they aren't ranking #1 for much anymore.  In fact, in many cases they aren't on the top10 PAGES anymore.  Worse, they will now probably be put under a much higher scrutiny by Google, which will make their future SEO campaigns all the more dangerous.  Even a well-meaning campaign can cross the line occasionally, which normally is never even noticed, let alone punished.  Recitative black-hat behavior, however, would seem a much more punishable offense. 

The December sales results notwithstanding, it is hard to say that JC Penney got what it paid for.  The thousands of links they purchased are no longer of any value.  I'm sure they spent a lot of money, and today they have nothing to show for it. 

Properly executed SEO is a much slower, more genuine process.   The goal should be to make a web site the most user-friendly, valuable resource for users.  If you provide users with invaluable information, the links, the rankings, the traffic and the page rank will follow.  It can take years to establish such a strong site, but when you perform SEO like this, it makes it much harder to get knocked off your pedestal.  It's a lesson JC Penney learned the hard way. 

But now the celebration is over.   Google is on to JC Penney, and suddenly they aren't ranking #1 for much anymore.  In fact, in many cases they aren't on the top10 PAGES anymore.  Worse, they will now probably be put under a much higher scrutiny by Google, which will make their future SEO campaigns all the more dangerous.  Even a well-meaning campaign can cross the line occasionally, which normally is never even noticed, let alone punished.  Recitative black-hat behavior, however, would seem a much more punishable offense. 

The December sales results notwithstanding, it is hard to say that JC Penney got what it paid for.  The thousands of links they purchased are no longer of any value.  I'm sure they spent a lot of money, and today they have nothing to show for it. 
Properly executed SEO is a much slower, more genuine process.   The goal should be to make a web site the most user-friendly, valuable resource for users.  If you provide users with invaluable information, the links, the rankings, the traffic and the page rank will follow.  It can take years to establish such a strong site, but when you perform SEO like this, it makes it much harder to get knocked off your pedestal.  It's a lesson JC Penney learned the hard way. 

More Evidence of the Importance of Social Marketing

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Besides creating websites and doing the SEO for law firms, we also have started building customized Facebook pages for our clients and work to integrate those pages into our client's sites as well. 

A lot of attorneys scoff at the notion of using Facebook.  It is hard for them to fathom someone turning to Facebook to find an attorney.    To be honest, I think that is probably correct.   Someone wouldn't turn to Facebook to find a lawyer, but they probably would be likely to be more interested in an attorney who their friends recommend.   And that is exactly what Social Marketing is about.

For over a year now, we've been hearing that it was only a matter of time before the Social Networks are integrated into the search engine results.   First, Google started putting recent Twitter posts on the SERPS pages, and now BING has introduced something that we think makes Facebook more valubale to our clients than we had even hoped for.  

If you do a search on Bing while logged into Facebook, your friends recommedations (LIKES on Facebook) will show up at the top of the results.  Search for Pizza in Los Angeles, and a few of your friends on Facebook have "Liked" a local pizza place, that will show up in the results.   The same would be true for a law firm.

Do I think this is going to be an immediate game changer?  No.  Bing is still too small.  BUT, one has to assume Google will do something similar.  And I do think that having a Facebook page now will give you time to build up a following, so that by the time this really matters you are already in the game. 

Here is a VIDEO from BING on their new feature:

Here is an article on Avvo about their take on the subject.

The BING / FACEBOOK Deal:  What It Means for Lawyers

Here are some examples of Facebook Pages we have built for Lawyers

Arias, Ozzello, & Gignac  - Facebook Page
Law Office of James Pokorny - Facebook Page
Bailey & Partners - Facebook Page

If you'd like to have a custom Facebook page built for your law firm or business, please contact us via this website or at 866-669-9404.