AttorneySync Blog

My experiences with using LinkedIn for our business have been great. From making new contacts, to participating in interesting discussions, to answering and getting answers to questions, I have found LinkedIn to be a great tool.

Unfortunately, I have noticed a recent trend in some of the groups to which I belong. I call it “Featured Discussion Abuse”. Here’s what I mean:

As you can see, the group owner has tagged all five discussion spots as a featured discussion effectively eliminating any other discussions to be displayed on the group’s overview page. Obviously, the group owner can do what she wants, it’s her group. However, it significantly diminishes the effectiveness of the group itself.

Even worse, often times these “featured discussions” aren’t discussions at all. Instead, they’re merely links to the group owners blog posts. Even worse than that, sometimes they’re links to a landing page to the group owner’s services. Being a free-market-kind-of-guy, I am confident that group members will “vote with their memberships”. LinkedIn limits its free accounts to 50 group memberships.

That being said, I’m certainly not one to be bashful about marketing one’s services. In fact, I’m sure there are some out there that would consider some of my own strategies to be on the aggressive side. Nonetheless, in this case, there are other ways to successfully publicize your content in LinkedIn. For example, turning your “post item” into a discussion item takes minimal effort and will actually produce better results.

And if content publicity is your only goal, then simply add it as a news item. Yes, I know that it won’t get the same visibility, but guess what, it probably doesn’t deserve it.

Just my advice, take it or leave it.

LinkedIn Guide For Lawyers Want to learn pro tips on utilizing LinkedIn for networking and growing your practice? Download AttorneySync's Free LinkedIn For Lawyers Guide.

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For those of you not familiar with Patrick Swayze’s 1989 masterpiece, Roadhouse is one of the best “bad” movies ever made. When the Double Deuce road house gets too violent, the owner hires Dalton, a professional “cooler” (head bouncer) to “take out the trash”. While this movie is loaded with ridiculous one-liners, one of the most memorable moments is when Dalton is introduced to his Double Deuce colleagues:

Be nice.

Like the cooler profession, the legal profession lends itself to frequent adversarial and confrontational situations. Unfortunately, most lawyers fail to appreciate the true meaning of Dalton’s philosophy.

You see, many lawyers believe that aggression, stubbornness, and rudeness, are the keys to zealous representation of their clients. You don’t have to search very hard to find lawyer advertisements, videos, and commercials that depict just how tough lawyers can be.

Please don’t take this as a call for lawyers to clean up and play nice. What I am saying, is that there are significant practical advantages of adopting the “be nice” strategy both in the practice of law and the marketing of a law firm.

Here are some great example’s, from Tom Kane’s excellent Legal Marketing Blog, of niceness hard at work for law firms.

Until It’s Time Not To Be Nice.

And of course, when the time comes not to be nice…. Well, you already know what to do.

5 Lawyer Marketing Mistakes To Avoid Want to learn 5 of the most common mistakes when marketing your firm? Download AttorneySync's Free Guide: 5 Lawyer Marketing Mistakes To Avoid.

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The All Powerful Linkerati?

Back in 2006, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz fame, cleverly invented a term for one of the most crucial components to search engine optimization. His term, “Linkerati“, describes the concept of identifying potential linkbait targets.

With all the “to-do” about content being king, the concept of identifying linkerati is often overlooked. You see, not all visitors and users of your website are likely, or even capable of linking back to your content.

For example, let’s say you maintain a legal blog. You know that content is important so you try to post something every day. In fact, let’s assume that you’re a rather talented legal blogger and your content has a relatively strong following. Comment discussions on your blog are robust, and your articles are frequently the subject of tweets and re-tweets. However, you can’t understand why you receive so-few links back to your blog. The answer, you’re not reaching the legal Linkerati.

Legal Bloggers – Legal bloggers have a lot of incentive to link to your content. They are usually very interested in the subject matter, they are active in the legal blog community, and most importantly, they want links to their own content. Legal bloggers are one of the best sources of relevant links.

Law Firm SEOs – While this may come as a huge surprise to some legal blog professionals, there are a large number of lawyers who don’t have the time, or frankly the desire, to moderate and administer links on their law firm websites and legal blogs. Talking to the law firm seos that handle these tasks on behalf of their lawyer clients, is a great resource for new links.

Legal Web News Writers – Tough to get, but exceptionally valuable, these folks control the legal news outlets on the web, including places like Law.com and other online legal news portals, etc.

Legal Journalists – Online or offline creators of “legal news” are probably the most valuable of all the legal linkerati. A reporter for any major news publisher can generate extremely valuable links back to your law firm website.

So who are your legal linkerati?

Free Guide: How To Build Links For Your Law Firm Website Want to learn how to get your law firm website more trusted, authoritative, and in front of more potential clients? Download AttorneySync's Free Guide On Building Links For Your Law Firm Website.

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As followers of our blog probably notice, when it comes to getting found in Google, we often cite what Google has to say. It’s sort of a “know your enemy” philosophy (obviously, we don’t consider Google an enemy, for now). One of our favorite resources that we put to work for our law firm seo clients is The Webmaster Central Blog.

This past Tuesday (March 2, 2010), Google released its SEO Report Card. It was reported as an effort by Google to “improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimizations”.

Whoa. Google is intentionally optimizing pages to influence their rankings? Then again, maybe not:

“These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users’ experience when visiting our sites”.

Ah, it’s just to help the users. I see. As they put it, the optimizations listed are definitely the most “simple and accepted”. Nonetheless, these on-page optimizations serve their purpose and are an important foundation upon which to build your law firm search optimization strategy.

If you’re looking to get started with on-page optimization, check out the Webmaster Central Help Forum and Google’s SEO Beginner’s Guide.

On the other hand, it’s important to keep perspective that doing these simple on-page optimizations alone will not allow you to compete in the highly competitive online legal marketing industry.

I for one, just appreciate the fact that Google not only uses search engine optimization in its vernacular, its also purposefully implementing seo strategies on its own pages. I just can’t wait for Google’s guide to link building… For now, we’ll just have to rely on our own.

Free Guide: How To Build Links For Your Law Firm Website Want to learn how to get your law firm website more trusted, authoritative, and in front of more potential clients? Download AttorneySync's Free Guide On Building Links For Your Law Firm Website.

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We’ve heard about how Google is making changes to make search more personal. But what effect does personalized search really have when it comes to your law firm internet marketing results? Virginia Nussey shares how search queries are frequently imprecise and how personalization can help fill in the gaps.

So what does this mean for your law firm? Actually, a lot of the same principles hold true. Having success isn’t about ranking well generally. The key is to rank well for the legal service consumers who are likely to hire you. The practical effect of personalized search is that your firm will be less likely to compete with the whole search universe. However, you will be more likely to compete with your local search universe.

For example, searches for “lawyer”, “attorney”, and “law firm” are more likely to return law firms in the geographic area from which the search is performed. One of the advantages is that if you’re local, you’ll be less likely to generate visitors from search that aren’t looking for lawyers in your geographic area.

For the most part, the traditional rules apply, write good content for users and not search engines. It is also worth noting that you can control personalization for your searches. Here’s a browser search plugin that does just that.

It will be interesting to see the impact of personalization on link profiles. For example, we know that getting links from geographically relevant domains is advantageous. Will personalized search increase the importance of geography in your link profile? My guess is yes.

Free Guide: How To Build Links For Your Law Firm Website Want to learn how to get your law firm website more trusted, authoritative, and in front of more potential clients? Download AttorneySync's Free Guide On Building Links For Your Law Firm Website.

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Depending your practice areas and nature of your law firm, you might be able to leverage many of the advantages that the internet and search engines afford to local businesses. For example, if you have a consumer-based practice (i.e. injury, bankruptcy, criminal defense, divorce, etc.) and a very targeted geographic area, you will most certainly benefit from paid search, google local business center, and various other local business focused web solutions.

In addition to the more generalized local business solutions, there are several “legal-specific” platforms, networks, and services that really work wonders for producing results for local search marketing. You see, law firm internet marketing isn’t ONLY about seo for your law firm.

Like local business owners, when it comes to law firm marketing matters, you want more quality potential client leads, some of whom will turn into new clients for your firm. Do you really care from which source these potential clients come? For example, assuming the quality of the leads is generally the same (which often is not the case for a variety of reasons), do you care whether new client leads come from your website, a directory listing, or some other source? Typically, the answer is no (although the cost, effectiveness, and efficiency will vary greatly). The key performance indicator is whether or not the source is producing a positive return on your law firm marketing investment.

That is why diversification across several local-legal internet marketing platforms is so important. It exposes you to many more segments of the legal services market and allows you to identify which platforms, networks, etc, are actually producing positive results for your firm.

Thinking like a local business owner has generated excellent results for many of our clients. In our experience, there’s simply no magic bullet solution that works equally well for all law firms. Successful lawyer internet marketing isn’t as much about seeking out that one method that works best, but rather, testing many methods and allocating more resources to those that perform well.

Free Guide: Hiring A Law Firm SEO Consultant Are you looking to increase your visibility online but are feeling overwhelmed by the number of service professionals promising the world to you? Download AttorneySync’s Free Guide On Hiring A Law Firm SEO Consultant.

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Ever wonder what effect ordering of key phrases has in Google? Pick any “geo-practice-legal” key phrase combination and search the various permutations. For example, let’s look at “boston bankruptcy lawyer”. It is very likely that each search will produce a different result. As you can see in this example:

boston bankruptcy lawyer

bankruptcy lawyer boston

boston lawyer bankruptcy

Should you target these various key phrase permutations on the same page? Isn’t that keyword spamming? Take a look at what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say on the matter.

The question really becomes one of balance. Obviously, you want to take advantage of as many different relevant key phrases as you can, without spamming Google and your visitors. As always, Mr. Cutts’ response is rather vague. “Just use them naturally”. Often easier said than done.

Free Guide: Getting Your Law Firm Found On Google Do You Want To Know How To Get Potential Clients To Find Your Law Firm On Google? Download AttorneySync's Free Guide On Getting Your Law Firm Found On Google.

Really the best advice is to try different key phrase variations. Just remember to think like a visitor and not like a search engine. Even if Google doesn’t penalize you for keyword stuffing, your visitors might (by bouncing off your page).

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Great heads-up from Jerry Work at Work Media Internet Marketing on a classic law firm seo magic trick. It’s unfortunate how many law firms are falling for it right now.

Here’s how the trick typically plays out:

SEO “expert” claims that she can take a specific, relevant keyword and get ranked number one on Google very quickly. She performs her SEO magic, and viola, Number 1!

However, the web page she optimized is the ONLY result returned by Google for a search of that keyword. Which means, there was not a single other web page competing against her page for that keyword.

It is easy to be number one when you have ZERO competition!

So, how do you avoid this nonsense? Hold your law firm seo accountable for producing results, not rankings. Make sure you are getting traffic increases, conversion increases, and ultimately clients. I mean after all, any law firm marketing should eventually generate more client revenue than it costs.

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A lawyer friend recently expressed to me that he has been having difficulty coming up with good ideas for blog posts. My advice, stop trying so hard.

Most bloggers will have some experience with blogger’s block at some point in their blogging careers. The typical reasons given for blogger’s block can be anything from fear to joy to boredom. Anything can cause this particularly frustrating condition to set in. Fortunately, blogger’s block tends to be a short-lived phenomenon. Luckily, there are several ways to overcome it. Here are a couple that I have found work wonders:

1. Schedule Your Blogging.
Pick a time to blog. Like exercising, scheduling a time to commit yourself to blogging forces you into the “blogging zone”. Even if you ultimately decide not to write during this time, in the very least, scheduling blogging time will serve as a reminder that you’re missing it.

2. Relax.
Too many lawyers are simply trying too hard when it comes to writing for their law firm blogs. Just write. You can always save your post as a draft, come back to it later, or abandon it altogether. Personally, I think over-thinking posts is the most common cause of blogger’s block. So, just write.

3. Step Away From The Computer.
If things get really bad, just stop trying. Go for a walk. Go to the gym. Watch TV. Sitting in front of an empty wysiwyg editor is just a waste of time. Often times, the harder you push against the blogger’s block wall, the harder it pushes back.

4. Diversify
Get a variety of draft posts in your blogging queue. Having multiple ideas from which to work will help you “change things up”. This will help when you’re having a difficult time getting started on a new post.

5. Stream Of Consciousness
There are many writing exercises used by the pros to help overcome writer’s block. My favorite is stream of consciousness writing. Just put something down. It doesn’t have to make sense at all. Just type words. Sometimes this will lead to an idea that you never would have consciously developed.

6. Relocate.
Is your chair comfortable? Get up. Move around. Go to a coffee shop. Sometimes the stagnation comes from sitting in the same place. Finding a new location may mean finding a new muse.

7. Remember Why You Started Blogging in the First Place.
What was it that caused you start your blog in the first place? Was it a life-altering event? Was it merely a desire to market your law firm? Either way, hearkening (hearkening, really?) back to why you originally started blogging can help overcome blockage. What motivates you to write?

When it comes to blogging for your law firm, everything can be boiled down to 2 simple words, “just write”. Effective blog posts can be just about anything. Too many lawyers hyper-focus on their content. Great law blog content doesn’t isn’t always about in-depth legal analysis and insightful editorials. What it’s always about is engaging your readers and giving them a reason to interact and come back for more.

Free Guide: Writing Content For Your Law Firm's Website Want to learn how writing content for your firm's site can help bring in business? Download AttorneySync's Free Guide On Writing Web Content For Lawyers.

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While it’s a relative “oldie” (2008), Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, discuss a variety of bulk link building strategies. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Link Building Tactics from White to Black.

When it comes to link-building, these guys know their stuff. This brief video breaks down the spectrum from pristine white hat tactics, to fringe black hat. Knowing how to attract links (and more importantly, how not to) can be the difference in beating-out your competitors when it comes to seo for your law firm.

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